Anyone who has any involvement in online promotion will have a Facebook profile. Hence the opportunity to combine your Facebook feed with your WordPress website offers a huge amount of potential for sharing posts and receiving comments and ‘likes’ with and from a much bigger audience.

Why do I need WordPress Facebook plugins?

Quite simply because there are nearly 1.2 billion people worldwide using Facebook. It is not hard to work out that within that huge market is a fair percentage of your target audience. Your target audience want a mixture of news, entertainment, personal interaction and information on products and services. This is what you can provide from your site with one of the many great WordPress Facebook plugins. Sharing your Facebook feed on your site is a simple way to make it more attractive and complement whichever one of the great WordPress themes that you choose.

Whether you are sharing your personal life through a blog, expanding a hobby or hosting a fully-fledged business through your site, WordPress Facebook plugins provide a helping hand in reaching the people that want what you have. And as a result they can provide a huge boost in your traffic.

There aren’t a huge amount of good WordPress Facebook plugins that are dedicated specifically to Facebook. Some of the best support Facebook but also carry functionality to promote the other major social media platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and StumbleUpon etc. Chances are you have a profile on many of these anyway, but you may only want to promote your Facebook feed? That is fine, and these plugins can provide you with whatever functionality you need.

Here, we have provided a mixture of the best dedicated WordPress Facebook plugins along with the best multi-functional plugins.

Facebook for WordPress

With this plugin you can grow your audience with shared stories powered by the Facebook ‘like’ and ‘send’ buttons. You can publish new content to your Facebook timeline or to your site’s Facebook page. This is also one of the best WordPress Facebook plugins for growing your subscriber audience as a ‘follow’ button allows visitors to do exactly that. Another great feature is the Facebook-powered comments section, which you see on many other sites. Here, threaded comments are Facebook-hosted but are added to your WordPress site and backed by Facebook identities and moderation. You can also embed Facebook public post content into WordPress posts by posting a link or constructing shortcode.

Social Box

This plugin covers all the major social media platforms and is an easy-to-use plugin that installs a sleek social media widget onto your WordPress site. Social Box allows you to display the number of Facebook ‘likes’ you have on your site, which is a good visual tool for promoting the success of your site. In addition to this all your posts are easily sharable.

Facebook Survivor

A great user-friendly plugin for integrating Facebook with your WordPress site. Facebook Survivor allows visitors to feel comfortable on your website because it uses their Facebook images and it is really easy for you to post on users Facebook wall and for visitors to post on yours, all whilst ensuring visitors don’t leave your WordPress site. There is also a new, simple Facebook login button rather than a registration form to ensure that you don’t lose visitors put off my having to register.

NextGen Facebook

Despite the name, NextGen Facebook doesn’t just support the one social media platform. That said, it does take a more detailed look at how you can improve your WordPress site’s visibility with Facebook. It helps you improve your Facebook page’s appearance, ranking and engagement but also adds open graph and rich pin meta tags and validates image dimensions to provide accurate media.   This plugin also includes author and publisher profile URLs for Facebook.

WordPress Social Stream

Again this does not just cover Facebook, and can combine all your social media profiles into one single feed. Social Stream can display your Facebook profile but also a rotating feed list of your other active social media profiles. Of course you can also share your WordPress posts easily via Facebook.

Recent Facebook Posts

This is a popular and very simple plugin which allows you to keep visitors up to date with your Facebook activity. The plugin displays your latest posts directly onto your site and also supports public pages that might be of interest. Recent Facebook posts is highly customisable and also very SEO-friendly.

Social Media Feather

Here is a simple, lightweight yet effective plugin that looks fantastic. Social Media Feather offers you the power to easily and quickly add ‘follow’ and ‘share’ buttons to posts and pages in a way that is unobtrusive but has maximum impact. This plugin supports retina display and as such is fully responsive to all devices. It also supports shortcodes, which means the Facebook sharing options can be placed anywhere on your site.

Facebook Likebox Slider for WordPress

A bit of a mouthful, but an attractive plugin that looks great, via an appealing tab design. A three-step process makes this very easy to install and use and the plugin comes with very good 24-hour technical support. Again, this is a mobile-ready and fully responsive plugin and is an easy way to increase your likes, shares and ultimately traffic. The name is once more quite misleading, as this plugin does support other social media.

Social Sidebar for WordPress

With this plugin you can add social links to your WordPress site and style them using CSS3. It is compatible with all browsers as it is built around HTML5. Social Sidebar supports automatic integration and has great features such as 100 different icons, four different themes, and can be placed on the left or the right sidebar to suit. The 24-hour support feature is also very impressive.

Multi Facebook Pages and Groups Posts

Not a plugin title that trips off the tongue but a very functional plugin that displays Facebook Recent Posts as a sidebar widget on your WordPress site. You can add more than one Facebook page, customise your colours and determine the number of posts per page. This plugin is also fully responsive as it uses the bootstrap framework.

Today we spotted a T-Shirt Designer WordPress Plugin that, with further development will no doubt be very popular. It has just been released and needs some obvious enhancements but on first inspection it looks great.

The T-Shirt Designer WordPress plugin allows users to design their own t-shirts with text and images, all through a drag and drag interface. First you pick a t-shirt of your choice, then you either add your desired text or you can upload an image. When adding text, you can change the font, color and size, then position it with a drag and drop action over the t-shirt. The plugin allows you to add multiple text boxes so you’re not restricted with just the one. Image wise, you simply browse your computer, pick an image of your choosing (ideally with a transparent background) and position it where ever you need it. You can also resize it in situ and in proportion.

Here’s one we made earlier…

Once you have the t-shirt looking like you want it, you can preview it, print it, export the image file or share it.

Now it’s obvious that you can add more than just t-shirts as products to design. How about merchandise like mugs, pens, mouse mats, caps, hoodies, jumpers, cardigans, vests and so on. The simplicity of the drag and drop interface will certainly appeal to users and theming the plugin for theme support is also possible.

Enhancements we’d like to see

Responsive layout and touch support

The plugin at the moment is responsive, which is great, but touch support needs to be included, with thorough testing.

Multiple views

A premium feature to include would be the ability to design multiple views, such as the front, back and sides. At the moment just the front view is available.

ECommerce integration

Without integrations into ecommerce platforms such as WooCommerce or Jigoshop, the plugin is extremely limited. Users will want to order their designs and pay online so a must see feature we feel.

T-Shirt designer WordPress plugin

Features at a glance

• Add unlimited images and text blocks
• Let the user add custom text blocks to the product
• Text colorpicker
• Change the color, size and font of the text
• Let the user drag, move or remove elements
• Google font API Loader
• Add unlimited custom fonts from Google Fonts or other services
• Users can upload their own design image or logo to print on t-shirt
• Shows preview of the designed t-shirt
• Users can choose their favorite t-shirt color from the uploaded products
• Export t-shirt design as PNG, BMP or JPG
• Printed t-shirt design

Alternatives

One WordPress plugin that already integrates with WooCommerce is the WooCommerce Custom T-Shirt Designer Plugin. At $25 is more than this plugin ($12) but it’s ready to use. Personally, we’re not so keen on that plugin due to the design of the interface and the restrictions to the number of positions and text blocks.

Check it out

T-Shirt designer WordPress plugin is available on CodeCanyon for $12. On there you can checkout a video demo, a plugin demo and options to purchase.

Everybody knows that a single image can most often tell a story better than twenty paragraphs of your finest writing. The brain computes visual images much faster than it does text, and this is particularly important online.

The design of your website is absolutely crucial, and this goes beyond just having a great WordPress theme. The visual impact that good images can make is often the difference between increasing your conversion rate by engaging visitors and losing them to another site on a Google search because your site isn’t appealing enough.

A good lead image reflects the credibility of your site, or even your business, and projects an image. Or it might be that you want basic images to illustrate your thoughts and be interspersed in your blog posts. There are plenty of sites for every need, and what is more they are free.

What do I need to be aware of when looking for free images?

Of course you can take photos yourself for your website, but they may be lacking in quality. You might even be a photographer building your own blog, in which case you won’t be showcasing anybody’s work but your own. However, many people are simply looking for free images for their site and don’t want to be paying out fees or involving themselves in copyright hassle. So how do you avoid that?

• It is easy to carry out a Google Image search and uncover virtually any possible image you will ever need, but chances are you will be violating someone’s copyright if you ever try to use that image.
• The sites listed below all specialise in free images, but you should always check the licence just in case. Some agreements vary and you need to ensure you cover yourself when using the image. Look out for free images covered under a ‘Creative Commons’ agreement. This essentially means the photographer/artist has waived all rights under copyright law and has dedicated their work to the public domain.
• When you use an image you should credit the photographer. This isn’t always obligatory under the licence agreement, but it’s just a nice thing to do. Someone has allowed you to use their work for nothing, so at least give them some credit.
• Browse each site to establish the style and subject matter you are looking for. Check how good the search options are and how easy it is to download the images you want.

The free images you want may be real photos by real people; a stunning lead image for your site, or they may be stock images of everyday scenarios, which can often be clichéd but good at illustrating a point. Whatever your need, check out these options.

Picography

Free hi-resolution photos. Use them however you like

Jaymatri

free pics. do anything (CC0). make magic.

Bootstrapbay

High quality Bootstrap themes & templates for your next web project.

Magdeleine

A free hi-resolution everyday.

Flaticon

The largest database of free icons available in PNG, SVG, EPS, PSD and BASE 64 formats.

Unsplash

There are hundreds of beautiful photos here, with different styles from landscape panoramas to product images. New images are uploaded regularly which can be copied, modified and distributed. All the images are covered under Creative Commons so there is no problem with usage. This is a great resource although the lack of a search function is frustrating.

Flickr

As the biggest photo-sharing site on the internet, every photographer with an online presence knows Flickr and uses it. Using the Advanced Search Page you can filter photographs under Creative Commons and still unearth the biggest choice of photos on the web. The free images are easy to download with a variety of sizes and quality, and you are almost guaranteed to find a suitable image.

I’m Free

This site collects images sourced from different third party sites, such as Flickr, so you will need to be careful to check all licences before you use an image. The images available cover a huge range and are for commercial use only, so this might not be suitable for everybody. There is a good range of categories such as technology, sports and people.

Stock.XCHNG

Here we have a great resource with a huge collection of over 400,000 free images. Be careful because the image licence agreement is quite complex, but it is watertight so worth looking at. The site offers tutorials on searching and downloading its photographs but it is a pretty simple process. You are also given a statistics function to monitor your image usage.

Open Photo

This was one of the first free images websites to appear and is long established as having good categories and being easy to navigate. There are nearly 40 different image categories, each of which open up to show great thumbnail galleries. The site also does its best to promote different photographers by having a ‘featured artist’ section.

Morgue File

With a generous licence and no need to register in order to download free images, this is a very user-friendly site. Morgue File has an excellent search tool where you can robustly filter out irrelevant images simply through selecting by category, keyword and image size.

Pixel Perfect Digital

This is more of a niche site in terms of the style of images. It will appeal to those looking for digital art and illustrations rather than simply photos. However, with 18 categories covering from abstract to what could pass as ‘stock’ images it is still a great resource for all. The content is unique and is hard to find elsewhere.

Public Domain Archive

As it says on the tin, this site collects high quality images from across the web to archive all in one place. Again, you need to check the licence agreements because of this. However, the site is very easy to navigate with a good search function that you can filter by category.

Free Digital Photos

Not an inspiring title and hence this is a pretty straightforward site for stock images, but still a great resource. Be careful because only some resolutions are free when downloaded, but there is still a vast library of free images.

Pixabay

All these images are free of copyright under Creative Commons, but be wary that the site does feature some sponsored images from Shutterstock, which are not free. Some stunning photos are included here, though, which can be found via a very good search function.

There was a time when there was a lot of resistance from webmasters to WordPress. The main pushback was around security, they had heard that the CMS was not inherently secure and were worried about having an insecure website.

But that was many years ago when WordPress was establishing its position as a blogging system and taking security very seriously.

Today, WordPress has evolved to the best Content Management System that powers millions of websites in different niches including media, technology, news, entertainment, government and more.

Despite the fact that WordPress has quickly become a popular CMS and continues to grow, like anything else, it’s not perfect. Every business is different and so are their demands. WordPress out of the box cannot fulfill them all. That’s why WordPress offers themes and plugins.

While installing WordPress, Themes and Plugins is only the first step towards establishing a successful business, keeping them up-to-date is extremely imperative.

But why, you may ask.

Like any other software, WordPress, and its plugins come with an updated version with fixed bugs and new features to improve the functionality of your website.

The major reason that makes WordPress so vulnerable is its popularity. A platform that powers up to a quarter of the web will certainly grab the attention of anyone seeking an access to your website to inject malicious code, steal information or take the site down.

Keeping your website up-to-date helps you prevent potential bugs in the current version or to leverage new features and functionalities of this CMS.

Reasons to keep your site up-to-date

Increased Security

Updating WordPress themes, plugins and WordPress itself usually improves security by repairing vulnerabilities and bolstering against hacking. So, to minimize the risk of your website being compromised or hacked, update!

Moreover, when a professional talks about the security of this CMS, the most important thing they mention is to keep everything updated.

As a matter of fact, spammers and hackers keep a close eye on the release notes. As soon as a new version releases, they start figuring out its vulnerability and exploit it. Updating your site with the latest version not only removes the vulnerabilities of your website but also combat hacking attacks.

According to a study conducted by WPBeginner, more than 83% of the WordPress websites hacked because of an outdated version running on them.

“Not keeping your sites up-to-date, you are giving an open invitation to hackers while leaving your website buggy”, says WebDesign.com.

Another study by Page.ly states that WordPress powered websites are hacked because of an outdated version of plugins, themes, WordPress, and PHP.

This clearly states how critical it is to update your website as soon as possible.

For example, a WordPress 3.5.2 release stated:

“This is a security release for all previous versions and we strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately. The WordPress security team resolved seven security issues, and this release also contains some additional security hardening.”

However, not all updates are required to update ASAP since only half of them include security patches. It is usually recommended to update within 7 days of the release to keep security threats at bay.

WordPress Performance

Updates are not just for security purposes. Most of the times updating a site will improve its performance.

As an instance, WordPress version 3.9 comes with enhancements to the performance of TinyMCE and WordPress version 4.1 comes with enhancements to complex queries to enhance the performance of websites.

Moreover, updating plugins also enhance performance, perhaps to accelerate queries or scripts or execute more efficiently.

Thus, running your website with latest updates will help your website perform at its best.

WordPress Bug Fixes

Other than security patches, a reason for minor WordPress update is to fix bugs in the current version. A minor release often represented with X.X.X instead of X.X (which is a major release).

Thanks to the experts who are behind these releases and diligent development cycle, most of the releases are often bug-free and stable. But despite the impressive feat of programming, a bug often slips through the internet, and a minor update will be released to rectify it.

As an instance, a WordPress version 3.8.3 released to fix a bug with the broken “Quick Draft” tool.

Themes and plugins are usually same and would have the same effect on your website if not updated frequently.

WordPress Features

WordPress updates also often come with new functionality and features, and yes, to leverage the power of these new features, you need to update your WordPress.

As an example, WordPress version 3.1 came with the introduction of the post format and admin bar. WordPress version 4.2 came with changed database coding, emoji support, and extended character support.

Plugins and themes can do this too, which indicates updating your site gives you access to the latest features.

Automatically Updating WordPress

Keeping in mind the importance of updating WordPress website, WordPress version 3.7 introduced automatic updates.

Your website will check almost every day for available updates and update them automatically.

However, if the update is major, WordPress does not update it automatically. You will have to update it manually.

As an instance, if a version 4.0.1 is available, it will automatically install. But if you are running a 4.0 version and want to update it to 4.1, WordPress would not update it for you.

By default, automatic updates are enabled. However, if you want to disable them, you can easily do it by adding the following line of code in your wp-config.php file.

define(‘AUTOMATIC_UPDATER_DISABLED’, true);

You can also enable automatic update for major releases by defining another constant in the same file i.e. wp-config.php. Add the following code to enable:

define(‘WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE’, true);

Conclusion:

It is extremely important to run the latest versions of the CMS. There are more than one method to perform the chore of updating your WordPress, its plugins and themes including automatic method and one click method.

Also, running an up-to-date website is a critical part of managing any successful website. It will guarantee that your website performs as effectly as possible and more importantly, it is free of any security issues and bugs.

Author Bio:

Jason is a WordPress expert, associated with Wordsuccor Ltd. and has a lot of experience in providing WordPress CMS Development Services. He has delivered numerous range of quality products related to this. He has a strong passion for writing useful and insights about WordPress tips and tricks.

Before you go searching for the best looking WordPress theme, to start building your new website or blog, take a few minutes to consider how a theme can impact things like your brand, user experience and search engine ranking.

The best WordPress themes allow any user to easily install and update all content across the site.  Always do your research to make sure your themes include a simple page builder with automatic updates.

Another wonderful way to expand the functionality of your site is to leverage a page builder that has an active community of developers.  Beaver Builder is a great recommendation for the newbie WP designer all the way up to the most advanced.

Thanks to WPShrug.com for this great info graphic.

We love to stay up to date on all of the new WordPress tips and tricks.  Thought we could share a few of our recent favorites with you from late December 2015.

How To Create an Image Gallery in WordPress

WordPress makes it incredibly simple to add an image gallery anywhere on your site, but many site owners fail to take advantage of this powerful feature….
New Free Hookr Plugin Displays All Available Hooks Inside WordPress

Earlier this year, Hookr.io entered beta with a new UI and support for 800+ plugins and themes. The site…

Improve Your Editorial Workflow in Multi-Author WordPress Blogs

Publishing content on a multi-author blog is not easy, to say the least. First there is the website…

The Best JavaScript Based Plugins & Themes for WordPress

For the last few years WordPress has been moving towards a JS codebase, and plugins and themes are expected to follow suit in a big way during the next year….

How to Use HubSpot Analytics with Your WordPress Website

In the first post of our HubSpot-WordPress Integration Series, we explained three ways that integrating your website with HubSpot creates a powerful web marketing machine for your business…

10 Successful Free WordPress Plugins That Use the Add-on Model for Monetisation

If you are looking for inspiration for the pricing model of your next product, or you just want to know which plugins you can start using today with the option of upgrading the features a a later date, then this article is for you….

Why 301 Redirect?

The 301 redirect is preferred for both users and search engines. Serving a 301 indicates to both browsers and search engine bots that the page has moved permanently. Search engines interpret this to mean that not only has the page changed location, but that the content – or an updated version of it – can be found at the new URL. The search engines will carry any link weighting from the original page to the new URL.

301 Redirect Recommendations?

It’s highly recommended to set up 301 redirects in WordPress if you change the URL (permalinks) of your posts and pages, or move your WordPress website from one domain to another.

If you are changing the URL / domain of your WordPress website, you need to plan carefully for it so that you don’t loose any of existing traffic and SEO elements of existing post/pages or old domain.

Adding 301 redirects in really easy in WordPress.

How to Setup 301 Redirect in WordPress?

Even though it’s no longer necessary, seeing the famous “www” in front of a website has become the standard. And to some, having the “www” there is a small sign of a website’s professionalism. Not having it there isn’t a demerit in the search engines, but it could be a small demerit in the eyes of your potential customers.

How do you redirect your WordPress site from “http://website.com” to “http://www.website.com”? That’s simple! And truthfully, it doesn’t get any easier than doing it in WordPress.

• Login to the WordPress dashboard
• Click the “Settings” button on the left-hand column
• Find the box marked “WordPress Address (URL)” and change http://your-website.com to http://www.your-website.com
• Find the box marked “Site Address (URL)” and change http://your-website.com to http://www.your-website.com
• Click the button marked “Save  Changes”.

Choosing “The Perfect WordPress Theme!” is important for any website. And it’s a minefield. Should you choose one which has great features, or the one that looks splendid? Will the theme perform well on all devices? Is it responsive or fixed? So many questions…

The Perfect Theme will help provide a memorable online experience to the users; a wrong one creates a plethora of problems you’ll have to spend hours attempting to fix up.

The Perfect Theme is not only pleasing to the eye, but practical and effortless to use for both developer and user. And these are the things you go looking for when you’re trying to find it:

Industry Specific:

This includes a whole load of variables. The right theme will have a certain layout where all your industry relevant content can fit easily without cluttering the entire website. For instance, e-commerce websites will require great product display options. Content heavy websites will need a sane and easy-to-browse way to manage and showcase different articles.

Most WordPress themes are specified by target audience or industry type nowadays. So make sure you know what category you fit into before beginning to look for themes.

Live Demo:

To check how a theme would look like once they’re in use, check out live demo, offered by all theme companies today. The demo will show various home page designs, along with theme variation for different pages on the site like About Us, Contact, Featured, and more.

Customer Reviews:

A lot of shoddy work can be weeded out by simply looking at customer ratings on the themes, especially if a theme developer is new and does not have a portfolio to showcase his previous work yet. If a theme has bad reviews, cross it off your list unless there’s scope for improvement (see Ease of Customization).

If a theme looks great but you have some qualms about anything, try to contact the theme creator directly. This would ensure that they are, in fact, active and at hand to help with potential problems or bugs with their theme.

Compatibility Crisis:

Themes often clash with browsers. It’s true that Internet Explorer, apart from being fodder for jokes and hilarity in general, will also give you great grief when it comes to selecting themes. Good news is it’s not very widely used nowadays (courtesy of said jokes). However, other browsers can also mess up certain advanced features, with the end result of features being unable to work as unintended or outright incompatible/disabled.

Check to see that your theme features work with modern browsers, especially if you have chosen a theme just for its special feature(s). Otherwise you’ll be wasting time and money trying to make it compatible with different browsers.

SEO-friendly themes:

A website’s structure plays an essential role in SEO results. Try to choose a theme which is SEO-optimized, which is a bit of a conundrum.

You see, there’s no way to know whether a theme is SEO-friendly without trying it first. To save yourself the trouble, look up customer reviews. Try to find out whether or not the theme is compatible with popular SEO-plugins like Yoast or All In One SEO pack.

Mobile responsive design:

Most themes nowadays are mobile friendly, so this is usually not a trouble. But in the interest of not being too complacent, test it for mobile responsiveness. Modern themes will pass the tests with flying colors, but some old themes (fix design) won’t. This is because they aren’t yet upgraded to run on different screen resolutions and orientations.

Mobile responsiveness test can be done manually, or with the use of services like ScreenFly, StudioPress, etc.

Ease of Customization:

Theme design should be flexible. Once you install and run a new theme, your website has to be built up over time with various elements and content. Simple and easy to use Theme Options panel and Theme Customizer will save you a considerable amount of time in the process.

Note: More intensive customization will need alterations in the code. For that, you will need the theme developer’s help, which frankly, you shouldn’t count upon as their product is intended to be sold as it is.

Coding Standard Compliance:

Being WordPress coding standard complaint and W3C validated is necessary. This ensures better search engine results and less security problems. Try to ensure compliance before you purchase the theme.

Support Community:

Try to get a theme which has good customer care and an active support forum provided by the theme developer. Also check that the theme’s documentation is clear and correct. This can prevent a whole load of troubles in future; and if you do run into snags, then the active support can help mitigate the problem.

Conclusion:

This is the basic checklist you should refer to before buying a WordPress theme to make sure your website doesn’t end up being a twisted, lumpy mess of content, and impossible to browse through to boot. It’s a minefield, choosing a theme.

The trick lies in balancing design and practicality.
Author Bio: Tracey Jones is a renowned WordPress Developer at HireWPGeeks Ltd. She assists her clients when they need to hire WordPress developer for their WP customization projects. When not busy with coding, she loves sharing useful tutorials regarding WordPress and its benefits. You can follow her company on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and GooglePlus.

WordPress blogging has come to the limelight in the recent history due to its flawless design and secure networking that out casted its competitors. Recently WordPress has been subjected to many brute force attacks over various versions. Here are some important security tips to ensure the integrity of your blog.

• The most important factor to keep in check is to use a very secure alphanumeric password for all your entry points. Maximum number of blog security breach has been attributed to the problem of weak password almost 67% of the bloggers use the automatically generated password provided during blog creation.
• Try adding a CAPTCHA to your login page.

Adding CAPTCHA highly reduces the chance of being hacked by bots by accessing user data. CAPTCHA is a very innovative security measure as it in most cases cannot be hacked without human supervision.

Always keep your WordPress account updated.

Keeping your WordPress account updated can help in preventing unnecessary security lapses creating chances for page penetration. Updating your account will also enable to you to use the new themes and tools to make you blog more presentable.

Be careful while applying themes or plugins for your blog.

Always be careful while uploading script, only download custom themes and plugins from secure sites and do not trust torrents or any other peer based downloading sites.

Always find a secure hosting service.

I agree that finding a very secure hosting provider can at times be expensive but you need to ensure that your host has enough backups to create a secure network for your WordPress account.

Check Option to limit Login attempts.

This tip can be very helpful in preventing bot attacks, it prevents login from non-specified IP addresses. You can set the IP addresses from which the log in could be secure.

Keep file editing via dashboard disabled.

“define( ‘DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT’, true );” use this code on your wp-config.php file to block any sort of file editing from your dashboard. This could act as an additional level of security preventing attempts to access data once the dashboard is hacked.

Keep your WordPress version always hidden.

Proclaiming your WordPress version on your blog will be almost similar to giving the thief the address of your house. Always make it a point to keep your version hidden as the intruders can analyse what all security lapses the proclaimed version has.

Always block the directory and plugin access.

If you haven’t disabled your plugins directory access the vulnerability of many of these plugins can affect your webpage security in an adverse manner. Always make it a point to block public access to all your plugin directory.

Always keep the WP- admin directory secure.

If you use a static IP address to manage your WordPress account you get a natural security of restricting access to a specified IP address. You can utilize the .htaaccess file from the WP –Admin file to enable this option. There are many set codes to implement in these codecs.

Always keep a backup.

Keeping a backup is the most efficient way to prevent data loss from your WordPress account. This can help in keeping the status of your WordPress account static even in the event of an unexpected attack.

Keep usernames hidden from your author archive URL.

Its default by WordPress to show your username in the author archives but it’s very risky and little ideal. You can prevent this fall in security by user name entry in your database.

Please avoid applying free themes.

Free themes is the major jackpot with which hackers gain access to your scripts. There are several reasonably priced themes you can use instead of the dead beat free themes which are often not very artistic and increases security risks.

About the Author:

Vaishnavi Agrawal loves pursuing excellence through writing and have a passion for technology. She has successfully managed and run personal technology magazines and websites. She currently writes for intellipaat.com, a global training company that provides e-learning and professional certification training.

The courses offered by Intellipaat address the unique needs of working professionals. She is based out of Bangalore and has an experience of 5 years in the field of content writing and blogging. Her work has been published on various sites related to Big Data, Business Intelligence, Project Management, Cloud Computing, IT, SAP, Project Management and

WordPress Landing Pages

Create landing pages for your WordPress site. Monitor and improve conversion rates, run A/B split tests, customize your own templates and more.

This plugin creates landing pages (a.k.a. conversion or splash pages) for your WordPress site. It gives site owners the ability to monitor and track conversion rates, run a/b or multivariate split tests on landing pages, and most importantly increase lead flow

Ultimate Landing Page and Coming Soon Page

Create a landing page or coming soon page and collect emails.

What you get when you use the Ultimate Landing Page and Coming Soon Page plugin

• Create a landing page with a customizable permalink to build your email list
• Create a landing page or coming soon page in 5 minutes
• Launch a one page coming soon site and collect emails to notify those interested when your site or product is ready

Landing Pages Builder

Create amazing landing pages from your WordPress site and host them anywhere. Monitor analytics and improve conversion rates and much more.

Create amazing Landing Pages, Pop-ups, Forms and Contests from your WordPress in seconds! Use one of our many responsive templates, run A/B tests, promote them with ads, and much more!

Ultimate Landing Page

Create Landing Pages or Coming Soon Pages easily in minutes with Ultimate Landing Page Plugin.Boost your sales and Conversions.

This powerful landing page builder lets you create beautiful and high converting landing pages in mere minutes without writing a single line of code. With our Landing Page templates your landing page will perform out of the box and increase your conversion rates instantly.Switch templates to test which template converts better, without any technical knowledge.

Easy Landing Pages

Get More Leads – And Convert More of Them – With Effortless Landing Pages + Smart Email Marketing + Referral Generation.

This plugin requires you to have a paid account with KickoffLabs. We help everyone build amazing landing pages and opt-in forms that can be published anywhere. We also enable auto responder emails and a viral boost referral system.

Startup Company Pro – We’ll be launching within the next few days.  It’s perfect for showcasing a new company, new product, or generating leads for your new idea. A one page theme that is simple and to the point.

Theme Details:

• Fully Responsive
• One Page Only
• Contact Form
• PSD included
• Google Map Integration

The top premium WordPress themes of 2015 are very powerful and will help you expand your business.  All have an easy setup and installation process.  Enable your business to control your website and update content on the fly.  No need to work through a web developer – all WordPress themes can be managed through your own admin area.  Update and push new pages, images, blog posts, pricing live in one click.

Accounting Pro

Accounting Pro is a responsive WordPress theme for Accountants and Accounting Firms. Accounting Pro is a turn-key website template that can be installed in 1-click. It comes packed with features to manage your website and is fully responsive so it looks great on any device.

 Agency Pro

Driving School Pro 

 Healthcare Pro

Healthcare Pro is a responsive WordPress theme for Nurses, Medical, and Healthcare Providers. Healthcare Pro is a turn-key website template that can be installed in 1-click. It comes packed with features to manage your website and is fully responsive so it looks great on any device.

Plumbers Pro

Plumbers Pro is a responsive WordPress business theme for plumbing and heating companies. Plumbers Pro is a turn-key website template that can be installed in 1-click. It comes packed with features to manage your website and is fully responsive so it looks great on any device.

Removals Pro

Removals Pro is a responsive WordPress theme for moving companies. Removals Pro allows moving companies to achieve a professional website at a fraction of the cost of one created by a Web Design Agency. It comes packed with features to manage your website and is fully responsive so it looks great on any device.

Revive Pro

No matter how much time and efforts you have invested in creating your website, ultimately it is the website’s visitors who will decide its usability (i.e. how useful your site is or what it lacks). In fact, usability plays a vital role in creating a successful website. Not to mention, the more usable your website will be, the more satisfying experience it will provide to your users.

Collecting feedback from experts and user experience can help you know what works for your site and what doesn’t. Wondering how you can know what your visitors like or dislike about your site? Usability testing tools can help you keep a tab on the user’s actions, and provide useful information that can help you improve your website usability.

In this post, we’ll have a look at 14 of the best usability testing tools that will let you get expert opinions about your web design. Additionally, the tools will help to test how users are interacting with your website and problems they’re experiencing with it.

Usabilla

Are you looking for a usability testing tool that specialize in providing continuous visual live feedback? In that case, Usabilla best fit your needs. More than 20,000 users have been using this tool in a bid to boost conversion, by obtaining visual user feedback on their website. In fact, some of the top-notch enterprises like HP, Vodafone, News Corporation, etc. use Usabilla’s products. It’s available for a 14-day free trial. After the free trial, you can upgrade your plan to a premium one, which costs around $49 to $199.

Key Features:

• Provide visual user-feedback in real-time.
• Helps in making improvement to website instantly on the basis of specific feedback.
• Helps to capture valuable user feedback regardless of the device or platform they’re using.

Concept Feedback

Concept Feedback helps to get expert feedback, recommendations and solutions about your design, implementing which can help to increase the conversion rate of your website. You can get your design reviewed by the community of experts for free. Or else, you can pay an expert ($119 per expert) to get your website reviewed.

Key Features

• Provide expert feedback for website, mockups, wireframes, landing pages, etc.
• Share website feedback with users and team.
• Instant actionable evaluations.
• Ability to rate a reviewer’s feedback.

Five Second Test

This is a great usability tool that helps to optimize your landing pages as well as call to actions, by making users to fill a set of questions within 5 seconds and get all the responses. You can sign-up with the community for free to create unlimited tests for free, however, you won’t be getting any responses. And you can buy responses, by paying $1 for each response.

Key Features:

• Takes only 5 seconds to provide testers feedback.
• Helps to provide feedback on images.

4Q Survey

Want to measure the customer experience to know if visitors are satisfied with your site or not? Well, then 4Q is the right tool for you. It’s a framework that helps carry out an online survey for evaluating user experience and satisfaction, and helps to implement improvements to your website quickly based on user feedback. You can either opt for its free plan or the premium one starting from $19 per month depending on your needs.

Key Features:

• It comes loaded with a rich set of tools offering valuable insight on user interaction with your site.
• Collect responses from 100 participants for free.

Feedback Army

Using this tool, you can request for feedback, by submitting 4-6 questions for your website and get a minimum of 10 responses from reviewers. Make sure to construct questions in a manner that help you get high-quality and effective feedback from reviewers. You can buy 10 responses for $40, 25 responses for $80 and 50 responses for $150.

Key Features:

• Help collect reviews about your site or images in an easy and quick manner.
• You can obtain results through email or RSS feeds.

ClickTale

Considering the fact that over 100,000 businesses utilize ClickTale to generate more revenue, clearly indicates how popular this usability testing tool is. And some of the niche brands that are using ClickTale to deliver a better customer experience are Walmart, Lenovo, and The New York Times to name a few. You can request to know the pricing structure of ClickTale paid plan via the contact form.

Key Features:

• The Session Playback feature provides the ability to analyze users’ actions and behavior on your website.
• Provide Heatmap Analytics.

Critique

This tool helps to get a review of your site, on reviewing another site. So, the more feedback you’ll post on any other site, the more feedback you’ll receive for your own site. This is an excellent tool for startups and businesses that helps to increase their website usability and boost conversions, by helping them connect with good web designers. And at the same time, it helps web developers to earn recognition in their area of expertise (and helps in getting them feedback regarding their work portfolio). The tool is free to use.

Key features:

• Provide spam-free content.
• Help to get short and meaningful reviews.
• Receive as much feedback as you like by reviewing other sites.

Optimizely

Optimizely is one of the best optimization tool that helps to deliver better customer experience for websites and mobile apps. In order to work with Optimizely, you need to add a code snippet in your website header, once you’ll receive the confirmation email regarding your code, you can use it in your dashboard. The tool is ideal to be used by startups, as it is available for 30-day free trial. To get more advanced features, however, you’ll have to purchase its paid version.

Key Features:

• Track user engagement, conversions, clicks or anything that can help in improving website usability.
• Powerful project management functionality.
• Supports Multivariate testing.

Feng GUI

Feng GUI helps to improve websites and adverts visually in just 5 seconds. It comes with a powerful dashboard that helps to predict human’s attention – realize what helps grab the attention of users towards your site. This tool perfectly suits the need of advertisers and agencies interested in measuring the performance of their ad campaigns.

Key Features:

• Pre-testing service helps to identify weak spots in your site.
• Provide Attention Heatmap Report displays image areas that easily catch the user’s attention.
• Help you get feedback in no time.

SilverBack

SilverBack is a Mac-based software that enables in-person usability testing. It helps to record the user’s session and view them later after the completion of a single session. You can even export session highlights. The tool is built on OS X Yosemite. An iPhone powered device helps to control SilverBack for uninterrupted recording.

Key Features:

• Helps record sessions screen interactions.
• Record audio and/or video of the tester.

Kampyle

Kampyle is an enterprise platform that helps to collect user feedback in structured and unstructured forms in just a matter of few seconds; and enables you to take action on user’s feedback in real-time. The free trial of this tool is available, and the premium plans start from $99 – $499 per month.

Key Features:

• Feedback Dashboard and Reports helps to provide detailed insight on customer behavior.
• Deliver visual representation of feedback provided by customers.
• Reduces shopping cart abandonment rate.

Userlytics

Userlytics helps to recruit participants who for performing usability tests on mobile apps, prototypes, landing pages and advertisements. In order to use this tool, you need to create a free account that will give you 7 credits each month, using which you can perform free tests.

Key features:

• Helps tests mobile applications’ usability on iOS.
• You can set the tasks users need to perform and duration of those tasks.
• Thorough QA is done to deliver optimal quality insights (in the form of videos).

Convert

Convert is an A/B testing software ideal to be used by experts and agencies for testing dynamic pages (such as e-commerce products and category pages). You can use this tool for free on a 15-day trial basis. The basic plan starts from $125 per month.

Key Features:

• Offer seamless integration with many different services like Google Analytics, BigCommerce, CrazyEgg, Drupal and many more.
• Integrate between your CMS or e-commerce platform in one code installation.
• Supports HTML and WYSIWYG editor.

Simple Mouse Tracking

Simple Mouse Tracking, as the name implies, helps to capture mouse actions (like movements, scroll, clicks, etc.) that a user makes on a site. To run this tool, you’ll have to install PHP on your web server, however, the main web pages don’t need to be written in PHP; instead they’ll require some JavaScript.

Key Features:

• It’s open source software, and hence, free to use.
• Replay captured mouse activities in real-time.
• Offer cross-browser compatible solutions.

Wrapping Up!

Getting feedback on your web deigns helps in improving the design, and most importantly, the usability of your site. Reading this post will help you become familiar about 14 best usability testing tools that can help to optimize your website’s usability.

Author Bio :

Sophia Phillips has been working as a professional in WordPress web development company and loves sharing information about leveraging multiple benefits of WordPress in the best possible manner. Currently, she has an impressive count of WordPress – related articles under her name.

Images play a huge role in content production, especially if you’re looking to create highly shareable and engaging posts. It’s important to find media that goes well with the subject matter, yet also offers a story of its own. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Sometimes, however, images can get lost in the deluge of imagery on the web. That is, they don’t really stand out enough to draw more eyes to your content. I don’t just mean on your own site. Users scrolling through their Facebook or Pinterest newsfeed will go right past your content, pausing on a brighter or more eye-catching image.

It can help, for starters, if your images are more unique to start with – ditch the dull stock photography, and instead, opt for visuals you create or choose from the abundance of free photos available all over the web. But sometimes, an image needs that special something.

That’s where these WordPress plugins come in. Since the visual side of content production is so important, we’re going to take a look at some WordPress plugins that will help your images stand out.

1. Canva

One of the great things about the WordPress plugin version of Canva is that once it’s installed, you don’t have toleave your WordPress dashboard to use it. Of course, it also happens to be one of the most full-featured and user-friendly image editors around.

2. Aviary for WordPress

Aviary is another great in-dashboard editor for WordPress. Images must be uploaded to the site before you can edit them, but once that’s done you have dozens – if not hundreds – of editing options to choose from. You can enhance the images with an autocorrect mode, add special effects or stickers, or even modify the sharpness or saturation. Of course, these examples offer nothing more than a taste of the editing support this plugin provides.

It is a premium application, which means you’ll pay $16 for a premium license. That said, it’s well worth the price, especially when compared to the average cost of professional image editing software.

3. InstaFX

InstaFX is a remarkably simple and useful plugin. It allows you to apply filters and special effects for your WordPress images – a la Instagram – through shortcodes. In case you’re not familiar with them, shortcodes are essentially brief commands that can be used in WordPress to call upon a certain function or action. You can use shortcodes to embed videos and change the style or appearance of a page. With this plugin installed, you can also add filters to your images.

It’s quick, easy and, best of all, you don’t have to alter the original image to add a filter.

4. Ultimate Image Filters

The Ultimate Image Filters WordPress plugin allows you to take advantage of 46 different filters, which can be applied to images in your media library. Just like InstaFX above, the original image is not altered in any way. Instead, the chosen filter is applied to a copy, preserving the original for use later.

This one is also premium, with a price of $15 for the regular license.

5. ImageMagick

If you spend a lot of time modifying or editing your images before you upload them to your site, or you just have a lot of images period, this plugin might not be for you. ImageMagick takes any image you upload and automatically enhances it by adding sharpening and resizing it appropriately, based on pre-configured options.

EXIF information is also left untouched, if that has some amount of significance for your site or content.

6. Multipurpose Before After Slider

This plugin specifically deals with before and after comparisons. It’s great if you offer content in a niche where you need to use before and after photos, like showing an example of what your image editing software can do or what your premiere diet plan can change. Whatever you decide to use it for, the Multipurpose Before After Slider integrates with your WordPress dashboard and is extremely easy to use.

It’s a premium plugin, so it will cost $16 for a regular license.

7. Anyhover

Anyhover is a simple WordPress plugin that adds animations and text to images on hover. It’s pretty self- explanatory, but it’s great if you don’t want to spend time adding this functionality yourself and your theme didn’t come with native support for it.

It’s a premium plugin, so you’ll have to pay $14 for a regular license to use it.

8. WordPress Image Hover Showcase

The WordPress Image Hover Showcase plugin allows you to add image effects, hover effects, text, and social sharing buttons to designated images. It will work for any site, but it’s probably most useful if you manage a community dedicated to user-uploaded images and content.

A regular license is $16 and an extended license is $80.

9. Justified Image Grid

If you’d much rather display your media, screenshots or portfolio in a stylized gallery, consider Justified Image Grid. It’s touted as the number one selling gallery plugin on CodeCanyon. This plugin allows you to add a responsive, highly-customizable image gallery to your posts or pages through simple WordPress shortcode. As you’d expect, there are a slew of gallery-based options and features such as auto updating, special effects and filtering support, infinite scroll and more.

This is a premium plugin, so it’s $28 for a regular license.

10. uSquare

uSquare allows you to add and customize a responsive grid for displaying a combination of images and text on your site. For instance, you could create a unique grid that displays your team members in a single page element by showing off their profile pictures, names and titles. It could also be used to display products, the professional services you offer, design schemes, feature blog posts and much more.

A regular license is $14.

There you have it! All ten of these plugins should help you enhance your images so they stand out and garner more attention. It doesn’t matter whether you use every plugin on this list or just one or two; they each offer their own set of unique features.

Adrienne Erin is a freelance designer and avid blogger. To see more of her work or get in touch, follow

@adrienneerin on Twitter or visit her blog about web design.

One of the most challenging aspects of keeping a blog is keeping it up to date, especially if you are writing for your business. It’s not easy to keep your blog up to date, but if you can manage it, you will be that much further ahead of your competitors.

A well-written blog underpins the financial viability of many businesses and serves as a mechanism to attract followers and increase a brand’s online presence. In many cases the benefits it can provide will rival that of most social media channels.

Essentially forming a direct line of communication to your customers, your blog, like any strong foundation, should be maintained. But how can this be achieved if you’ve run out of ideas?

The following ten ideas offer a range of potential fixes to the ever-present danger of writer’s block.

1. Capture Creative Ideas as They Come to You

This practice has been benefiting writers the world over for generations, and many of today’s bestsellers will tell you they always keep a notepad handy. In fact, with recent technological developments, anyone with a smartphone will have access to wide variety of powerful multi-purpose digital notebooks.

One such popular tool is Evernote, a platform that can appear in a number of guises depending on your needs but will allow you to capture screenshots of anything interesting you see on or offline. This can be a great way to source and store potential content topics.

2. Integrate News and Current Events

You may have seen businesses highjack a hashtag or news item relating to a worldly event (such as the Super Bowl) in order to promote their products to a wider audience than would normally be available to them.

In doing this the company is essentially newsjacking a current event and then reappropriating its message by inserting itself into the conversation. When done correctly and with a certain degree of tact, this can be a viable option for businesses seeking new ideas.

3. Find Ways to Make Your Topic “Go Viral”

When a story builds traction to a point where it hangs around, spreading throughout the online community for a few days or weeks at a time, you’ve hit upon a rare thing. The key to capitalizing on this is to collect the data and attempt to replicate the result in future articles.

A great tool capable of doing this is Buzzumo, which is hailed as being an all-in-one package that can provide businesses with the insights they need to create a greater competitive edge in every aspect of their online activities.

4. Rewrite Old Blog Posts

With the passage of time comes the wonderful advantage of hindsight. Remember, your archives are potentially deep wells of information, and amending or rewriting an older blog post with new information or pursuing a different angle can create something entirely new. Most of your visitors will probably not arrive at your blog and read the most recent posts – they will arrive via search engine somewhere amidst your archives, so the more up-to-date you keep them, the better.

In many cases your readers will appreciate the time you’ve taken to revisit something they cared enough about to read in the first place.

5. Survey Your Readership or Audience

Speaking of readers, you might find yourself in a position where it’s possible to ask your newsletter subscribers, social media followers, or even website visitors what type of content they would like you to cover.

In this way, you can tailor your services and guarantee an audience but you can also create momentum off the back of their energy and enthusiasm to encourage a dialogue. Sometimes you won’t need to come up with all the answers yourself, and occasionally it may be better that you don’t.

6. Establish an Editorial Calendar

On April 22, 2015, Earth Day will be celebrating its 45-year anniversary which may provide some businesses with an opportunity to reach their target audience through a month-long marathon of posting environmentally-related content.

Other world events, appreciation days, themes, holidays and/or historical anniversaries may also provide you with a wealth of ideas to choose from and will help to keep you blogging on a regular basis. Make sure you know the observances in your own industry – the healthcare and medical industries in particular feature a number of devoted days, weeks, and months that can be drawn from for content.

7. Use Blog Topic Generators

If you’re truly stuck for ideas, there’s nothing wrong with turning to the internet for help. More specifically you’ll want to visit a blog topic idea generator for all your content needs.

You’d be surprised at how useful these can be when a particularly severe bout of writer’s block hits. They are fairly intuitive to use and ideally should be a favorite destination in your bookmarks bar.

8. Break Your Content Up Over Multiple Posts

Serialization is something the world is currently seeing a lot of. Everything from books to films are being made into trilogies, sequels and prequels, and then packaged to create the perception of value in the eyes of consumers.

The same thing can work for blog posts, and the idea has a lot of merit when you take into account the fact that more people will be inclined to read multiple, shorter posts than an article that is incredibly long and difficult to get through. Additionally, this allows you to explore topics in greater detail and thus get more mileage out of them.

9. Answer People’s Questions

If you’ve ever been asked for your opinion on a matter or for advice in a particular area, you’ll most likely have provided an extensive and comprehensive answer. And in the case where many people (or customers) have asked you the same question, making your reply public and exploring the subject thoroughly may be worth your while.

Another approach is to find questions to answer by utilizing the popular Q&A platforms that exist such as Quora or Yahoo Answers and subsequently communicating your reply in an article of your own.

10. Turn a Topic on Its Head

Lastly, one of the best methods to produce content efficiently and effectively is to take the road less traveled. Think of ways to slant a particular article in a way people will not expect. The idea here is to create an enticing headline that seems to contradict public perceptions by either making a backward claim or setting the record straight on a popular misconception.

And there you have it. If you only take one thing away from this article, it should be that ideas are everywhere and that they are more accessible than ever before. Take the time to browse the resources linked in this article and remember, the most difficult aspect of maintaining a blog will always be physically writing the article itself.

Image: David Goehring

Adrienne Erin is a freelance designer and avid blogger. To see more of her work or get in touch,

follow @adrienneerin on Twitter or visit her web design blog.

Since its inception in 2003, WordPress has become virtually synonymous with the Internet. The free, open-source CMS platform allows users across the globe to create and publish professional-grade websites, all without ever entering a coding editor.

As of 2012, one in every six websites on the Internet were powered by WordPress, and those hosted through its cloud-based Web services attracted more than 330 million visitors who viewed upwards of 3.4 billion pages between them each month.

While those figures speak volumes about the popularity of WordPress – which has showed no signs of slowing down in the years since – just what is it that allows the platform to dominate the Internet’s top blogs and other online media spaces? Many would claim that the scope of customization is what pulls many an avid webmaster into the fold – and that’s where plugins come into the equation.

Essentially, plugins are customizable strings of software that can be uploaded to expand and extend the functionality of WordPress websites. In this article we’ll be listing the top 10 starter plugins for WordPress beginners to help get you started. Whenever I have a fresh WordPress install, these ten plugins are what I reach for first.

1. Akismet

The first plugin you should install after establishing your blog and allowing opening it up for comments is Akismet. This plugin differentiates between genuine comments from engaged audience members and spam comments generated by bots, sending all those deemed inappropriate to your spam folder. Akismet is fantastic at picking out spam and it is unlikely that genuine comments will appear in your spam folder.

One case where you might opt to skip Akismet is if you use a third-party comments platform like Disqus. Disqus has its own built-in spam comment solution.

2. Jetpack by WordPress

The Jetpack by WordPress plugin adds a range of powerful new features to your website, including custom CSS, contact forms, sidebar widgets, tiled galleries and infinite scrolling capabilities. These performance-enhancing tools are designed to integrate your website with mobile compatible browsing options, allowing you to publish directly from your email and track your visitor engagement levels. It also includes a featured called “Publicize,” which allows you to hook up your social accounts on various websites and publish to them automatically when your post goes live.

My favorite aspect of the plugin is the great built-in stats and analytics feature, which lets you investigate how your audience is reaching your site without leaving your admin panel. Jetpack is a great plugin used by professional bloggers and amateurs alike.

3. WordPress SEO by Yoast

If you’re looking to write quality content or improve the rankings of your posts, WordPress SEO by Yoast is definitely a plugin worth your time. It’ll take care of the technical side of things and will guide you in creating SEO articles through proper keyword implementation, and by offering page analysis.

4. WP Smush.it

If you intend on uploading a ton of images, install the WP Smush.it plugin to reduce their file sizes and minimize overall load times – a significant aspect of Google’s new search engine algorithm. WP Smush.it will run in the background, allowing you to multitask, and best of all requires little to no maintenance after you’ve installed it. This plugin is great for images of any size – even infographics! The popular auto blog CJ Pony uses WP Smush.it to decrease the file size of their infographics.

5. jQuery Pin It Button for Images

If you’re looking to make the most out of the functionality of your images, jQuery Pin It Button for Images is a great plugin to have. By adding a customizable “Pin It” button on image hover, it entices visitors to click your images and save them to their boards on Pinterest, sharing your blog post with their followers in the process.

6. Google Analyticator

Google Analyticator’s simple function is to add the necessary code to add Google Analytics tracking to your site without your having to edit your site’s code. In addition, the plugin includes several new dashboard widgets in its latest version that will allow you to see how your site is doing at a glance, without leaving the admin panel.

7. Shareaholic

Shareaholic provides bloggers with a suite of tools for distributing and monetizing their content. Incorporating a social share bar as well as recommended posts either on or off-site, the plugin helps people find more of your blog’s articles both from your blog and social media. In addition, Shareaholic provides affiliate linking and social analytics apps designed to promote content and social sharing all in one powerful, yet easy-to-use dashboard.

8. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (Basic or Pro)

There are two versions of the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin that you’ll need to be aware of. The first, basic, will display pages, posts and custom post types in relation to current entries in order to introduce your readers to other relevant content on your site. Some themes, like Pegasus Pro, already include a related posts feature. Usually this is enough to suit your needs without upgrading.

However YARRP’s premium plugin is a bit of an upgrade and can be used in tandem with the basic version for increased control over the customization options. This lets you choose between the best of both worlds so that you can find an optimal balance that works for your blog and your audience.

9. W3 Total Cache

As a WordPress performance optimization plugin, W3 Total Cache is designed to improve load times and positive user engagement levels by increasing server performance. This becomes particularly important the more traffic your site receives, but it’s great to set up at the beginning.

10. UpDraftPlus

One thing that many WordPress users tend to avoid – until it’s too late, that is – is backing up their websites. The process becomes laughably uncomplicated when you install UpDraftPlus. In fact, this plugin is the most popular WordPress backup plugin, with good reason.
Backups are uploaded to the cloud (Amazon S3), Dropbox, Google Drive or any of the other popular alternatives, and restorations are as easy as a mouse click. Premium options are available for those with more specific backup needs.

While you certainly don’t need to install all of these, take the time to consider which will be most useful to you and tailor your plugins directory accordingly. At the end of the day what matters most is that your WordPress website performs exactly the way you want it to.

Adrienne Erin is a freelance designer and avid blogger. To see more of her work or get in touch, follow @adrienneerin on Twitter or visit her web design blog.

WordPress Theme for Restaurants

We’ve been busy preparing the fifth WordPress theme in our new series of WordPress themes that we’ve been launching.. The first, Removals Pro launched first and was the first in our ‘Trade’ based series of premium WordPress themes. The next three were Plumbers Pro , Florists Pro, and Accounting Pro and today we’re excited to show you a sneak peek of the fifth theme in the series and some of the amazing features it will have.  We’re really excited about this one.

Restaurant Pro, a responsive WordPress theme for restaurants that comes packed with features. We have directly built and integrated the theme around the Visual Composer plugin which means the layout of each and every page can be changed to fit your business. We have added a  large amount of custom elements that you can drag and drop into your page/post, either via the traditional backend editor or the amazing front-end editor, which allows you to see exactly how the page will look before you publish it.

We will name all of the features in this upcoming theme during launch but here’s a quick update on some of the features you can expect to see:

• Menu page – this area allows the restaurant to showcase all of their meal options
• Visual composer
• Google maps
• Bootstrap 3
• Homepage banners
• Shortcodes
• Blog
• Social links
• 50+ shortcodes

Restaurant Pro will be the fifth in the ‘Trade’ based ‘Turn-key’ WordPress themes series, filled with usable trade specific imagery and ready to launch almost immediately. Designed to be easy to setup and populated, this theme will be perfect for restaurants wanting to get online fast, generate new business leads and manage their website without any coding skills.

Fully responsive

Restaurant Pro will adapt automatically to fit all modern day touch devices, such as tablet and smartphone devices, so no matter how your visitors are browsing, the website will fit perfectly.

Come back soon for an update on Restaurant Pro and our other WordPress themes for small businesses.

Accounting Pro is a responsive WordPress theme for Accountants and Accounting Firms. Accounting Pro is a turn-key website template that can be installed in 1-click. It comes packed with features to manage your website and is fully responsive so it looks great on any device.

There are no ironclad rules with WordPress. Arguably the most popular content management system around, WordPress keeps taking giant leaps from one wave of web technology to the other – all the while, staying true to the basic structure of user-friendliness.

Now, the leaps taken by WordPress are either to adapt itself to the ever changing trends, or to set some new trends of their own. WordPress webmasters across the planet are still warming up to what trends 2015 has brought along, and what else does it have in store for us for the rest of the year.

Here are a few predictions that we are sure the WordPress design & development trends of 2015 will ramble around:

Minimal Designs are Going to Have Maximum Impact

They already have, but the impact is only going to be deeper. The flat designs will continue registering their formidable presence on the web, and there are bona fide reasons for the same. Of all the tings, a flat design goes a long way in enhancing the user experience by keeping your website fast and light. So, it would be a good idea to go to the style.css file of your theme and get rid of those bells and whistles in the form of shadows, gloss, the 3D effects, fancy textures and so on.

Pageless Websites Take the Reins

No more 2-click or 3-click navigation rules. The new age web user would rather prefer scrolling, and this forms the very foundation of the upsurge that single page websites are experiencing. But more than the user’s behavioral tendencies, it is the devices they use which are dictating the slant towards the single page websites. On the mobile devices, clicking means squinting your eyes and pointing your finger tips just to tap that right link on the page. Apparently, thanks to the smaller screens, the buttons are often too close to one another and users end up clicking A when they rather wanted to click B. So, that’s that!

For the same reason, vertical scrolling is taking over and more and more single page websites seem to be springing up. While they are yet to be seen ‘all round us’, but by the end of 2015, they might as well.

Responsive Web Designs Will No Longer Be a Luxury

You can’t have a website and not keep it responsive. The absurdity quotient of having an unresponsive web design is only going to elevate in 2015. In its bare bones, a responsive web design is the one that adapts to the varying screen sizes seamlessly, without paving way to any compatibility issues. And with Google putting its weight behind the responsiveness of of the websites, it now has become a gold standard on the Internet.

Now, if you have been keeping an eye on your Google analytics report, you might as well have realized that a large chunk of your visitors come from mobile platforms. So, making sure that your website doesn’t give the mobile users a hard time browsing is imperative and determines how good or bad the user experience ends up being.

Typography Won’t be Overlooked as Rampantly (As is the Case Presently)
Since the dawn of time, the fonts like times New Roman have been seen just about everywhere, on all websites, across all pages and sections. But lately, there has been a switch. Webmasters are realizing that in order for their websites to stand out of the herd, the typeface and fonts need to exude a different character of their own.

Typography is becoming more and more expressive and the expressions are only headed north this year. We are going to witness investment of greater levels of creativity as the website owners will sign up for the services of web designs just to get the fonts on their website right. There will be a more clever use of colors but more importantly, the smaller screen consideration will lead to fonts getting bigger and bolder. There is already a huge bent towards keeping the text on web pages to bare minimum, and it is likely to continue. And this gives the designers even more room to experiment with fonts and colors.

Modular Design Will Establish a Stronger Presence

This one steps from the growing slant towards single page websites. Vertical scrolling may not always be sought after. Modularization of content will be at an all time high in 2015 and each block of the content will have its own behavior. Visitors won’t need to hop from one page to the other, rather, they can simply click on a block and the full content will pop up right then and there, and then they can get back to the original page by clicking on the close button or anywhere near that pop up window.

Technologies Like HTML5 and CSS3 Will Rule the Roost

These two technologies have already captured the imagination of just about every web designer out there. CSS has emerged as a bona fide great tool for web designing, and so has HTML5. The latest version of CSS has only got more people talking and even more using it.

While one one hand they give a free hand to designers to be inventive in their approach and process, they also leave a lot of scope for a design to be compatible and remarkably responsive.

Large Background Images

Pictures have always spoken a thousand words, and web has been no different. Any brand gets to send across its brand message in a more penetrative manner with images as opposed to doing so with text. But the latest trend of having background images on the blog timelines is catching the fancy of many webmasters. As elements like flash and animations make their exit, the large, HD background images are filling that gap exceedingly well. These images not only make the pages visually more appealing, but they are also domain and brand relevant.

2015 has just begun, but going by the current slant of web designers and developers, it’s not hard to predict where it’s heading to.

About the Author-
As a certified top-notch web developer at OSSMedia Ltd, Edward Jones has an impressive expertise in WordPress & he provide concrete information on wordpress related tips & trends. If you need to hire wordpress developer then simply get in touch with Edward via Twitter and Google+.

If you’re not blogging your way to conversions, you’re missing out. A good business blog is a gateway to many opportunities. Your blog will be seen by three entities: the people who care about your brand, the people who stumble upon the helpful content you’re sure to post, and the search engines.

All three of these entities are vital to the growth of your business. The people who already care about your brand should be appropriately nurtured. The people who find you because they stumble upon one of your posts are your leads. And the search engines hold the power to exponentially grow your business.

Plus, what is there to lose? There are many good reasons to start a blog, and not very many reasons not to. Of course, blogging requires time and commitment. But there are plenty of excellent resources out there to help you get started.

Why Your Business Needs a Blog

Before we delve into some useful tips for launching a blog, let’s look at 3 reasons why your business needs a blog.

A Blog Increases Site Traffic

Your website gets more attention if you’re blogging. And that’s a fact. Every time you post a blog poses a new opportunity for people to learn about your business. A good website blog has the potential to open many new doors for your business.

Consider for a moment you’re a new plumber, starting a brand new business. You operate a fully functioning website, but it’s without a blog. Once you launch a blog, however, you begin to notice increased queries over the weeks as you publish relevant, high-authority content. Why does this happen?

A Blog Increases Your Google Ranking

It’s really quite simple. With the right strategy, blogs get lots of love from the search engines. When your ranking begins to increase, more people will read your blog and explore the rest of your website. As more people read your blogs and discover your website, you benefit from more conversions.

As Google continues to refine its algorithm into the future, it will continue to reward those who are well-deserving. Don’t haphazardly toss together content and expect that to earn you respect. You must post high-quality, actionable content that will resonate with your readers.

A Blog Gives You Authority

An authority. A thought leader. An industry leader. Whatever you want to call it, creating and maintaining a blog that’s regularly updated with relevant, high-quality content will help position you as a trustworthy source of helpful information. Your audience will begin to expand. As it does, you will gain its trust. Furthermore, your competitors will take further notice to what you’re posting — and if you’re not already someone making waves in your industry, a blog will help you get there.

How to Get Started

Your business already operates a fully functioning website, so why not take it to the next level? If you’re already using WordPress to power your site, you can very easily add a blog. Plus, there are plenty of business WordPress themes that come with an obvious spot for a blog. Consider the following tips for beginning a business blog.

Make Room

You might need to rearrange a few elements on your website to make room for a blog. Whatever theme you decide to implement, remember that helping visitors easily find your blog is a must. If they have to search for it, you are probably losing some potential fans along the way.

Brainstorm Ideas for Content

As you prepare to further position yourself as an industry authority, thoroughly consider your audience. Your blog posts should not all be promotional or sales-y. The idea is to engage and inform your audience. Think about who will land on your blog and the types of things those people would like to read.

Using the example from above, say the new plumber was struggling to come up with ideas for content. It’s important to remember blogs can be about anything, as long as that information is relevant to the audience. The plumber could write about new bathroom and kitchen designs, why it’s important to use filtered water, and how to fix a leaky faucet. Any topic that might be of interest to his potential clients is worthy of a spot on the blog. Fortunately, if he is using a theme like Plumbers Pro, his blog posts will be right there for current clients and potential clients to benefit from.

If creating this kind of content sounds like more than you want to handle, you might want to hire some help. A content writing service or a freelance writer and/or editor can help. Don’t forget to put some thought into visual content you create for your blog, as well. If you go this route, be sure to hire the best talent you can afford.

Create a Content Calendar

Instead of trying to squeeze time for blogging into your already busy schedule, aim to flesh out an editorial calendar. Doing so will help put your ideas in motion. Decide on the frequency with which you want to post, and then make it happen. This is also a good time to do your keyword research. While search engine optimization (SEO) is shifting to reward quality, keywords still have a place in your content as long as they’re incorporated naturally.

Maintain and Post

After your content has been created, post it. To save you more time, you can add the posting component to your editorial calendar and schedule the posts in advance.

Also, be sure to incorporate as many social avenues as possible. Once you post a blog, be sure to promote it via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and any other networks you use. You can also use a social media management service like HootSuite, which you can use for free, to do the posting for you.

Remember to nurture your blog over time. Maintaining a blog for your business doesn’t have to be difficult or the source of a daily headache. With a little effort and some appropriate planning, your business can benefit from the many paybacks that come with effective blogging.

Adrienne Erin is a freelance designer and avid blogger. To see more of her work or get in touch, follow @adrienneerin on Twitter or visit her web design blog.

Here at FrogsThemes we are getting into the holiday spirit in dramatic fashion this year by offering a 50% off Black Friday coupon code. Valid until Tuesday December 2nd, the code will get you 50% off your order.

FrogsThemes Black Friday Coupon Code

To get an additional 50% off your order, simply use the FrogsThemes coupon code ‘blackfri2014’ at checkout. Browse through the website find a theme or two that you just have to have, add them to your basket and then click on the basket link in the header of the page. On the checkout page you will see a coupon code field. Enter the code and click on ‘Apply Coupon’.

We recommend browsing through all of our WordPress themes and making multiple purchases to really make the most of our discounts.

50% off Coupon code: blackfri2014

Happy Holidays!

Driving School Pro Just Launched

Today we have launched a brand new WordPress theme aimed specifically at driving schools and instructors called Driving School Pro. It’s the fourth theme in our new series of trade-based WordPress themes that we’re focusing our attention on over the next few months.

Unlimited Possibilities

Driving School Pro has been built around the brilliant Visual Composer drag-and-drop page builder plugin and delivers endless layout possibilities.

Visual Composer allows users to replace the standard WordPress WYSIWYG editor with a drag-and-drop interface with over 50 powerful shortcodes. Add columns, drop in your shortcode and you’re well on your way.

1-Click Installation

Driving School Pro can be installed and setup exactly like the demo in under 5 minutes, without worrying about complicated theme documentation.

Simply click a button using our 1-click installer and you’re installed. From there you can change any aspect of the theme to fit your requirements. Add pages, blog posts, lesson pricing and more.

Features At A Glance

Here’s a quick list of some of the features you can expect to see in Driving School Pro:

• Visual composer
• Portfolio
• Jobs listings
• Google maps
• Contactform7
• FontAwesome icons
• Bootstrap 3
• Homepage banners
• Shortcodes
• Blog
• Pricing tables
• Team section
• Social links

Buy Driving School Pro Now!

Driving School Pro is available to buy today for just $49, use the theme on unlimited number of websites under your control.

Buy Driving School Pro for $49

Club Members Get This For Free!

If you’re an active club member you can access this theme for free in your account area. If you’re not a member you can signup to get this theme and every other theme in our collection for one small annual subscription cost. You will also access to future theme releases while you are subscribed – ideal if you’re a developer or a digital agency.

WordPress theme for driving schools

We’ve been busy preparing the fourth WordPress theme in our new series of WordPress themes that we’re launching over the next few months. The first, Removals Pro launched first and was the first in our ‘Trade’ based series of premium WordPress themes. The next two were Plumbers Pro and Florists Pro and today we’re excited to show you a sneak peek of the fourth theme in the series and some of the features it will have.

Driving School Pro, a responsive WordPress theme for driving schools, comes packed with features. We have directly built and integrated the theme around the Visual Composer plugin which means the layout of each and every page can be changed to fit your business. We have added a trunk load of custom elements that you can drag and drop into your page/post, either via the traditional backend editor or the amazing frontend editor, which allows you to see exactly how the page will look before you publish it.

We will name all of the features in this upcoming theme during launch but here’s a quick update on some of the features you can expect to see:

• Visual composer
• Jobs listings
• Google maps
• Contactform7
• FontAwesome icons
• Bootstrap 3
• Homepage banners
• Shortcodes
• Blog
• Pricing tables
• Team section
• Social links
• 50+ shortcodes

Driving School Pro will be the fourth in the ‘Trade’ based ‘Turn-key’ WordPress themes series, filled with usable trade specific imagery and ready to launch almost immediately. Designed to be easy to setup and populated, this theme will be perfect for driving schools wanting to get online fast, generate new business enquiries, manage your website without any coding skills.

Fully responsive

Driving School Pro will adapt automatically to fit all modern day touch devices, such as tablet and smartphone devices, so no matter how your visitors are browsing, the website will fit perfectly.

Come back soon for an update on Driving School Pro and our other WordPress themes for small businesses.

We’re not 100% sure when Driving School Pro will be ready to purchase and download just yet so stay tuned for updates for more news on this theme.

Recently we ran a short term deal to offer 50% off the first years membership to our WordPress themes club, and due to it’s resounding success, we’ve decided to reintroduce the same offer on a semi-permanent basis – amazing!

Half Price Signup

The club membership is now only $49 for the first year, half the price of a normal years membership and one of the best subscription-based clubs available.

Currently we have 17 premium WordPress themes on our collection, all up to date with the latest version of WordPress and bursting with customisation options.

The club membership also includes the PSDs for EVERY theme plus unlimited access to support and theme updates while you’re active.

If you cancel your subscription, you won’t pay a penny more than the signup fee of $49 and you get to keep the themes you downloaded. You will however lose access to support, theme updates and any future themes we release, so it’s certainly advisable to stay subscribed.

Responsive and fixed width WordPress Themes

We have 11 responsive WordPress themes available for you to download now, including our newest trade-based themes for florists, plumbers and removal companies, plus a selection of our other best sellers. There are also 6 fixed width WordPress themes available to download, with their PSD files.

We’re not sure how long we’re going to be running this offer for so please take advantage while the deal is active.

Everybody has an opinion and most people are more than ready and willing to share it. That is why adding a survey feature to your WordPress site is a simple and easy way to enhance it by adding a whole new dimension. There are several great WordPress survey plugins available to achieve this, but first of all, you might need some convincing on why your site needs to get involved in surveys and polls.

How will WordPress survey plugins help my website?

Quite simply, WordPress survey plugins will drive traffic to your site. There are several ways in which they can do this, but there are other advantages to adding a survey to your site which are not just down to simply attracting more hits. If you are clever of course you can use surveys as a tool to improve your coverage, but you can also improve the quality and variety of your content and even your site design.

• Surveys and polls create interaction with your audience.

• You can link your articles to surveys which help gauge opinion and might prompt ideas for further content.

• Surveys and polls inevitably trigger discussion, so you can use WordPress survey plugins to build traffic for your forum or comments on the back of an article. Feedback and interaction generates more feedback and interaction.

• Surveys can help build traffic through social media.

• You can learn more about the demographic of your audience through surveys. This can help future considerations for content or the general direction of your site.

• Some WordPress survey plugins have great graphical features that help your site stand out and look more visually arresting.

• A survey instantly changes the mood of your site, as much as installing a great WordPress theme or adding content. Visitors see a survey that they can easily get involved with, and immediately there is engagement and a higher return rate.

    So here is a list of some of the best WordPress survey plugins currently available. Whatever the nature, size or visit rate of your site there is sure to be a plugin to suit you in this list.

Social Polls by Opinion Stage

This is one of the most popular WordPress survey plugins and also one of the most powerful. Despite that it is very easy to understand. You can add polls to your WordPress site or to your Facebook page. You can create, edit or delete polls, view poll participants, social network identities and filter survey participants and results. There is also a good tool for analysing the results.

Web Engage

Web Engage allows visitors to report issues and suggest ideas through surveys, and is particularly good for sites that sell products or services, rather than a simple blog. A good analytics module allows you to monitor progress on all surveys and polls.

Survey Press

This plugin is useful if you want to grant roles to different users within your site and therefore you partake in survey management rather than running it yourself. Survey Press administrators can integrate WordPress with Lime Survey, which is an open source survey tool. This allows your assigned administrators to import users from Lime Survey and WordPress, and those users can see your active surveys on their dashboard. This is perhaps suitable for an organisation that specialises in market research and has several surveys running concurrently.

WordPress Simple Survey

One of the most flexible yet powerful WordPress survey plugins, this allows you to create surveys, polls, questionnaires or quizzes. All data is stored in your WordPress database so you can analyse the data via your WordPress dashboard and track submissions as they arrive. You can also receive results by email if you wish. For the user, all the survey questions are easy to view on one page.

Colored Vote Polls

Here we have a plugin that is particularly suitable for surveys with multiple choice questions. As the name suggests, different colours are used for each survey response, which allows for results to be displayed in great visual and custom formats. You can make answers mandatory or selective and the surveys can easily be embedded into posts or pages through shortcode. This is one of the more easy-to-use and setup WordPress survey plugins.

FSQM

This stands for Feedback, Survey and Quiz Manager and hence you can collect feedback and survey results and host quizzes too. Again this might be a plugin that is suitable for specialists in running surveys, because it allows users to submit their own surveys. You can then analyse these submissions and users can track their own submissions too.

Skysa Polls App

Syksa Polls App allows users to vote on topics you create, and you are able to add and delete polls, set their position and customise them to suit your site. Although this appears to be one of the WordPress survey plugins that is simple enough to run alongside a basic blog, it does allow you to have multiple polls and surveys running at the same time. Hence it is an adaptable and versatile plugin.

Feedweb

The designers of Feedweb make a play of promoting the privacy and security provided by this plugin. It is built using HTML5 and offers good security settings which are obviously important to WordPress survey plugins. Feedweb is simple and easy to use and allows you to insert customised rating widgets into selected posts. Again, you also have the option of answering selected questions or making some mandatory.

Advanced Polls for WordPress

This is a great plugin that allows you to create surveys and polls and display the results in a series of attractive graphical formats. These also appear in nicely designed pop-up windows. There are no restrictions on the number of polls you can have running at any one time, so you can add and manage an unlimited amount.

Pinnion

With this plugin each survey, quiz or poll can be embedded anywhere within your WordPress site, not just in your posts. In addition, the results data can be emailed or posted on Twitter or Facebook as well as being visible directly within your WordPress account. As with pretty much all the products in the list, this plugin is easy to use and install. 

Everybody knows that a single image can most often tell a story better than twenty paragraphs of your finest writing. The brain computes visual images much faster than it does text, and this is particularly important online.

The design of your website is absolutely crucial, and this goes beyond just having a great WordPress theme. The visual impact that good images can make is often the difference between increasing your conversion rate by engaging visitors and losing them to another site on a Google search because your site isn’t appealing enough.

A good lead image reflects the credibility of your site, or even your business, and projects an image. Or it might be that you want basic images to illustrate your thoughts and be interspersed in your blog posts. There are plenty of sites for every need, and what is more they are free.

What do I need to be aware of when looking for free images?

Of course you can take photos yourself for your website, but they may be lacking in quality. You might even be a photographer building your own blog, in which case you won’t be showcasing anybody’s work but your own. However, many people are simply looking for free images for their site and don’t want to be paying out fees or involving themselves in copyright hassle. So how do you avoid that?

• It is easy to carry out a Google Image search and uncover virtually any possible image you will ever need, but chances are you will be violating someone’s copyright if you ever try to use that image.
• The sites listed below all specialise in free images, but you should always check the licence just in case. Some agreements vary and you need to ensure you cover yourself when using the image. Look out for free images covered under a ‘Creative Commons’ agreement. This essentially means the photographer/artist has waived all rights under copyright law and has dedicated their work to the public domain.
• When you use an image you should credit the photographer. This isn’t always obligatory under the licence agreement, but it’s just a nice thing to do. Someone has allowed you to use their work for nothing, so at least give them some credit.
• Browse each site to establish the style and subject matter you are looking for. Check how good the search options are and how easy it is to download the images you want.

The free images you want may be real photos by real people; a stunning lead image for your site, or they may be stock images of everyday scenarios, which can often be clichéd but good at illustrating a point. Whatever your need, check out these options.

Unsplash

There are hundreds of beautiful photos here, with different styles from landscape panoramas to product images. New images are uploaded regularly which can be copied, modified and distributed. All the images are covered under Creative Commons so there is no problem with usage. This is a great resource although the lack of a search function is frustrating.

Flickr

As the biggest photo-sharing site on the internet, every photographer with an online presence knows Flickr and uses it. Using the Advanced Search Page you can filter photographs under Creative Commons and still unearth the biggest choice of photos on the web. The free images are easy to download with a variety of sizes and quality, and you are almost guaranteed to find a suitable image.

I’m Free

This site collects images sourced from different third party sites, such as Flickr, so you will need to be careful to check all licences before you use an image. The images available cover a huge range and are for commercial use only, so this might not be suitable for everybody. There is a good range of categories such as technology, sports and people.

Stock.XCHNG

Here we have a great resource with a huge collection of over 400,000 free images. Be careful because the image licence agreement is quite complex, but it is watertight so worth looking at. The site offers tutorials on searching and downloading its photographs but it is a pretty simple process. You are also given a statistics function to monitor your image usage.

Open Photo

This was one of the first free images websites to appear and is long established as having good categories and being easy to navigate. There are nearly 40 different image categories, each of which open up to show great thumbnail galleries. The site also does its best to promote different photographers by having a ‘featured artist’ section.

Morgue File

With a generous licence and no need to register in order to download free images, this is a very user-friendly site. Morgue File has an excellent search tool where you can robustly filter out irrelevant images simply through selecting by category, keyword and image size.

Pixel Perfect Digital

This is more of a niche site in terms of the style of images. It will appeal to those looking for digital art and illustrations rather than simply photos. However, with 18 categories covering from abstract to what could pass as ‘stock’ images it is still a great resource for all. The content is unique and is hard to find elsewhere.

Public Domain Archive

As it says on the tin, this site collects high quality images from across the web to archive all in one place. Again, you need to check the licence agreements because of this. However, the site is very easy to navigate with a good search function that you can filter by category.

Free Digital Photos

Not an inspiring title and hence this is a pretty straightforward site for stock images, but still a great resource. Be careful because only some resolutions are free when downloaded, but there is still a vast library of free images.

Pixabay

All these images are free of copyright under Creative Commons, but be wary that the site does feature some sponsored images from Shutterstock, which are not free. Some stunning photos are included here, though, which can be found via a very good search function.

The best creations require planning and quite often the process involves many discarded ideas and arrivals back at square one. In order to create we need an area in which to practice, run wild with an idea and just experiment in safety.

Why should I install WordPress locally on a PC?

Every WordPress user likes to test and experiment and therefore the decision to install WordPress locally on a PC is a no-brainer. This allows you to test and develop great themes or just play around with your WordPress website without it affecting your live site. Your local site will also run faster, so it will save you time and frustration to develop your site in this way too. All the WordPress-compatible themes and plugins are available to use as normal. Finally, you might also save money on purchasing a hosting package before you really need it.

So what tools do I need to install WordPress locally on a PC?

XAMPP is the free, open source application you need to set up the local server environment on a Windows PC, by allowing access to local PHP and MySQL servers. The name stands for ‘Cross-platform’, Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl. An alternative application you could use is WAMP, which is free and very similar in its set-up, but for this exercise we are using XAMPP.

If you install WordPress locally on a PC this is only for development and testing because, obviously, this version of your site is only visible to you. You will still need to set up a domain name and purchase a suitable hosting package if you want your website to be visible to the public. However, many WordPress developers and established website designers work this way and set up a local test site initially.

With XAMPP you can set up as many test versions of your site as you want. XAMPP also runs on a Mac and Linux.

Step 1: Downloading your XAMPP software

First of all you need to get hold of the software files for XAMPP.

• Find the official XAMPP download link on the Apache Friends website and download the ‘free’ version of the software.
• Launch the XAMPP installer.
• The XAMPP set-up wizard will now guide you through the installation process.
• In the next screen you are asked to choose your components for the installation. Apache and PHP are essential to this so they are blanked out so you cannot de-select them. For this installation we would recommend you select MySQL and phpMyAdmin and just ignore the rest.
• Now select a folder in which to install the XAMPP files. We recommend that you create a new folder and give it a meaningful name. Ensure you don’t choose to locate the files in the ‘Program files’ directory as this could cause permission issues later.
• The next window is a promotional screen that asks you about installing Bituami, but you can ignore this.
• Click ‘next’ to install the application. The screen will then ask if you would like to start the control panel. Leave this ticked to ‘yes’ and click on ‘finish’.

Note: You may receive some security/firewall messages during the installation. In this event just check the box stating “Private networks, such as my home or work network” and “Allow access”. If you don’t do this XAMPP will not work properly.

• The control panel should now be open (if it doesn’t open automatically after the previous screen, go to your XAMPP folder and open it manually).
• In the control panel open both Apache and MySQL. Both of these should run fine, but if you have any problems this could be because other applications on your PC are using the same ports. If this is the case, quit those applications and re-start XAMPP.
• Visit http://localhost in your browser to check if the new local server has installed. You should see the XAMPP home page if this is all OK.

Step 2:  Setting up the MySQL database

This is essential to the WordPress installation.

• In the XAMPP control panel click on the ‘Admin’ icon in the MySQL section.
• The php.MyAdmin interface now opens in a new browser window.
• Click on ‘Databases’ in the top left-hand corner of the screen.
• This will now ask you to ‘create new databases’.
• Give your database a meaningful name such as ‘My WP site’.
• Click on ‘create’ and close the window.

Step 3: Download and install WordPress

• Go to WordPress.org and download the latest version.
• Go back to XAMPP, find your ‘htdocs’ folder and drop your un-zipped WordPress folder in a new folder within it. This will act as your roots directory. Give this folder a name, we would recommend this is the same name as the database you created above, ie. something like ‘My WP site’.
• Open the WordPress folder and find the wp-config-sample.php file. Open this using notepad or Wordpad, re-name it as ‘wp-config.php’ and save it. This is your configuration file.
• In your new file, scroll down until you see the screen prompting you to change your database name, username and password.
• Exchange the words ‘database_name_here’ with the name of the MySQL database you created above in the ‘php MyAdmin’ screen in step 2.
• Exchange the words ‘username_here’ and ‘password_here’ with the word ‘root’ in each case. This is just the default username and password.
• Save the file.
• Now in your browser go to http://localhost and you should see the WordPress welcome screen and the last screen for the installation process.
• Enter all your details as normal, the name of your website or blog, your password and your email address. You can click off the privacy box, because you are running this on your local PC, so search engine visibility is not important in this case.
• Click on ‘install WordPress’.

Now you can log into your dashboard and start to create your website. When you have played around with this, or developed your themes or plugins as you want to, you can upload the site to your hosting package. Make sure this is compatible with WordPress. By repeating steps 2 and 3 you can also create more versions of your test site. Just give them different names.

Image Credit: WordPress logo by Phil Oakley, Flickr

Creating the WordPress website or blog that you want can take a lot of time and can involve many changes and discarded ideas. Like anything we create in life, we need an area in which to practice, run wild with an idea and just experiment in safety.

Why should I install WordPress locally on a Mac?

Every WordPress user likes to test and experiment and therefore the decision to install WordPress locally on a Mac is a no-brainer. Using WordPress in a local environment allows you to test and develop WordPress themes or just play around with your WordPress website without it affecting your live site. So it is safer than testing on a live site and your local site will also run faster, so it will save you time and frustration to develop your site in this way too. This installation process only takes a few minutes, but you will also save time working in a local environment by not having to install and re-install WordPress online.

So what tools do I need to install WordPress locally on a Mac?

First and foremost you will need a programme called MAMP, which stands for Macintosh Apache MySQL PHP. MAMP is an application you can install on your Mac that allows you to have access to a local PHP server and MySQL server. This gives you the tools you need, via the necessary server set up, to run WordPress on your machine rather than on the internet. For MAMP to run properly you must have MAC OS X 10.6.6 or later.

If you install WordPress locally on a Mac this is only for development and testing because, obviously, this version of your site is only visible to you. However, many WordPress developers and established website designers work this way, and they all use MAMP.

Step 1: Downloading your software

First of all you need to get hold of the software files for both MAMP and the very latest version of WordPress.

• Find the official MAMP website and download the ‘free’ version of the software with the one-click solution.
• Download and un-zip the MAMP files
• To install the files drop them in your Applications folder
• Open MAMP up. You will be asked if you want to use MAMP Pro, which is the premium version of the application. Just ignore this, you don’t need it for now.
• For WordPress, go to WordPress.org and download the latest version, again with the easy one-click solution.
• Pull WordPress from your download folder, un-zip it and drop it on your desktop in a suitable folder.
• Go back to MAMP, find your ‘htdocs’ folder and drop your WordPress folder in it. This will act as your roots directory.

Step 2: Fix your MAMP settings

You will need to do this before you can install WordPress locally on a Mac. This process is effectively setting up the ports for both Apache and MySQL, but just involves changing them from the default settings to the recommended.

• In MAMP, click on ‘preferences’ and then the ‘ports’ tab.
• Set the Apache port to ‘80’
• Set the MySQL port to ‘3306’
• Click on the ‘Apache’ tab and choose the location on your local machine where you intend to install WordPress. Ideally this should be in a new folder inside your documents folder, but you can name it anything you like.
• Click ‘OK’ to save your changes.

Step 3: Creating a MySQL database for WordPress

• Go to MAMP applications and hit ‘start servers’.
• Check on the MAMP application screen that both the Apache and MySQL servers are running.

• WordPress runs a php.MySQL server so we need to start a MySQL database.
• Go to the open start page.
• At the top of the screen click on the ‘php MyAdmin’ tab, this manages your MySQL databases.
• Go into ‘databases’, then ‘create database’.
• Give your website a name that you will remember.
• Click on ‘create’.
• Open a new browser window and type in ‘http://localhost/name of the WordPress folder you created earlier.
• WordPress will notify you that it was unable to find the ‘wp-config.php file’. Now click on ‘create a configuration file’.

Step 4:  Install WordPress

You are now ready for the final step; to install WordPress locally on a Mac.

• Having created the configuration file, open it and you will be prompted to change the database name, the username and the password.
• Exchange the words ‘database_name_here’ with the name of the MySQL database you created above in the ‘php MyAdmin’ screen in step 3.
• Exchange the words ‘username_here’ and ‘password_here’ with the word ‘root’ in each case. This is just the default username and password.
• Save the file.
• Now in your browser go to http://localhost and you should see the WordPress welcome screen and the last screen for the installation process.
• Enter all your details as normal, the name of your website or blog, your password and your email address. You can click off the privacy box, because you are running this on your local Mac, so search engine visibility is not important in this case.
• Click on ‘install WordPress’.

Now you can log into your dashboard and start to create your website. When you have played around with this, or developed your themes or plugins as you want to, you can upload the site to your hosting package. Make sure this is compatible with WordPress.

You can use the WordPress plugin Duplicator. Duplicator allows administrators to migrate, copy or clone a site from one location to another. This is exactly what you will need to do at some point. You can also use the plugin as a simple backup facility. However, this process will require above average technical knowledge so is perhaps not recommended for WordPress beginners. Other plugins are available for this process, such as WordPress Move, which is a free plugin and BackUp Buddy, which is a premium plugin. In all cases, make sure your site is backed up and safe, and seek some support to make sure the process is painless, secure and correct.

Instagram is the most recent social media phenomenon, with over 200 million users signing up to share their skilfully-filtered photos and videos since it was launched in 2010. It is a great way to make your work look amazing in a really simple way. Furthermore, there are a number of WordPress Instagram plugins that allow you to upload your Instagram profile and images to your WordPress website.

What do you want from WordPress Instagram plugins?

The plugins on offer differ depending on your needs, ie. do you just want a neat button or link on a sidebar, or do you want a full screen gallery or a slideshow? Do you want full control over image size, descriptions, slideshow timings etc, or do you just want to import a basic feed to your posts? Whatever you want there are fit-for-purpose WordPress Instagram plugins for you, and ingenious ways to enhance the appeal of your site and open your images or videos up to a wider audience.

Here are ten of the best:

Alpine PhotoTile for Instagram

This is simple-to-use but very comprehensive, and is one of the most stylish WordPress Instagram plugins. It is highly configurable with widgets and shortcode and there are five different layouts for each format with good settings for the gallery design. The key feature is its user-friendly nature, with a shortcode-builder provided and full instructions for setting up an Instagram API. You can also decide between linking to your Instagram page, a specific URL or a lightbox slideshow.

Simply Instagram

Here there are options to integrate your images from your Instagram account into your WordPress theme design using a widget, or into your content area using shortcode. This plugin also allows you to display a ‘Follow’ link along with detailed stats on photo uploads and followers. Visitors can also view your images using a slideshow.

Instagram Slider Widget

This is one of an increasing number of responsive WordPress Instagram plugins that makes your images look great on mobile devices. You can display up to 20 posts in a slider or grid layout and the plugin allows you to set an interval that checks for new posts to display. Another great feature here that enhances the responsive nature of the plugin is that the thumbnail images are stored locally, so after the initial display they load instantly.

Instagram Theatre

Instagram Theatre is a premium plugin that can create the ultimate Instagram gallery and portfolio. Here we can display images in a variety of ways, such as thumbnail grids, lists or in full screen mode. The plugin pulls images from popular Instagram feeds, via hashtags, from multiple users or from locations that you set up. This is another of the WordPress Instagram plugins that looks great on mobile devices as it is fully responsive.

Yakadanda Instagram

Here we have one of the most popular WordPress Instagram plugins that can show off your profile stats with a profile widget and show off your images with an images widget. Again, the plugin is responsive and can modify the speed, height and frame rate of your image scrolling. Yakadanda Instagram supports WordPress multi-sites and can display up to 380 of your images, or those of other users, in a gallery. You can set up which images to display as recent, feed, liked or tagged.

WP Instagram Widget

This is one of the more simpler WordPress Instagram plugins, as it is a widget that displays a barebones listing of the latest photos of any Instagram user. To configure your feed, you just need to specify the Instagram username you want to display along with the number of posts. This is a suitable plugin for those users that are happy to design the output themselves as there aren’t too many features to help with that. WP Instagram Widget really just handles the mechanics of displaying the photos, which is all many people want.

WP Instagram Images Widget

As the name would suggest, this is a similar plugin to the one above. It provides both a widget and shortcode and can configure thumbnail size and the number of images to display. You can also open images in a new tab and show image descriptions if you want to. Again, this is a good choice if you are competent at styling your images and galleries yourself.

Instagram Photo & Video Gallery

This is one of the range of premium WordPress Instagram plugins, with a great feature that caches images on your website in order to display them quickly for the user. This plugin really concentrates on the user experience as, in addition to the superfast image loading, it supports high pixel density devices. The plugin can source images from specified Instagram user accounts or via hashtags and you can also view images using a lightbox gallery. This is a really comprehensive plugin as it allows you to play around and customise all visual aspects, such as the image size, number of columns on the page and add a follow button.

Enjoy Instagram

Enjoy Instagram is another popular plugin that is responsive and optimised for mobile devices. How your images look is a key feature here as you have the option of displaying images in both a grid or a carousel format, and you can also control the number of images displayed. The user can display images via a widget or shortcode, and the plugin also supports Instagram hashtags. However, on the downside there is no local storing or caching of images so the time to display can sometimes be slow, which might be an issue with some users.

Dsgnwrks Instagram Importer

This is a very simple plugin that doesn’t pretend to offer all the bells and whistles of its more comprehensive competitors. As the name suggests, here you are basically just importing Instagram images as posts into your existing WordPress blog. It is an easy-to-use plugin which gives you good control over how images are imported, and this will suit many users who have only this basic requirement and don’t want to get bogged down with shortcode and design features.

Florists Pro Just Launched

Today we have launched a brand new WordPress theme aimed specifically at florists called Florists Pro. It’s the third of our new series of trade-based WordPress themes that we’re focusing our attention on over the next few months.

Unlimited Possibilities

Florists Pro has been built around the brilliant Visual Composer drag-and-drop page builder plugin and delivers endless layout possibilities.

Visual Composer allows users to replace the standard WordPress WYSIWYG editor with a drag-and-drop interface with over 50 powerful shortcodes. Add columns, drop in your shortcode and you’re well on your way.

1-Click Installation

Florists Pro can be installed and setup exactly like the demo in under 5 minutes, without worrying about complicated theme documentation.

Simply click a button using our 1-click installer and you’re installed. From there you can change any aspect of the theme to fit your requirements. Add pages, blog posts, work examples and even setup an eCommerce section to sell your products.

Features At A Glance

Here’s a quick list of some of the features you can expect to see in Florists Pro:

• Woocommerce integration
• Visual composer
• Portfolio
• Jobs listings
• Google maps
• Contactform7
• FontAwesome icons
• Bootstrap 3
• Homepage banners
• Shortcodes
• Blog
• Pricing tables
• Team section
• Social links

Buy Florists Pro Now!

Florists Pro is available to buy today for just $49, use the theme on unlimited number of websites under your control.

Buy Florists Pro for $49

Club Members Get This For Free!

If you’re an active club member you can access this theme for free in your account area. If you’re not a member you can signup to get this theme and every other theme in our collection for one small annual subscription cost. You will also access to future theme releases while you are subscribed – ideal if you’re a developer or a web design agency.