WellHealth Quality Care is a growing medical network I’ve been working with over the past five years or so. This new site is one of several I’ve developed for their network. We’ve got more in the works!

Mobile Responsive Design and WordPress

iPads and other tablets are now outselling desktop computers, and are expected to outsell laptop computers in 2014. If you haven’t gotten the message yet, having your site mobile-friendly is crucial to your business. All websites I’m currently developing are running on WordPress and incorporate mobile responsive design. This means that each of these sites are a powerful branding tool, and are very functional on all mobile devices.

Click-2-Call

Taking advantage of mobile responsive design easily allows me to set up your site like I did for WellHealthMetabolic.com. Whenever the side is viewed on a mobile phone, one of the biggest buttons on the homepage says, “Click to Call Now!” So you don’t have to memorize or copy a number, then go to your phone app to make the call. You just tap the button and you can have your phone dial the number right away!

Visit: WellHealthMetabolic.com

Want this for your site?

Is this the kind of setup you’d like to have for your business’ website? Get in touch and I’ll be happy to talk with you, answer any questions you might have about developing a website that takes advantage of the ever-growing mobile market, and is a powerful online branding tool for your business.

This is the second design I’ve done for Ryan Frank and his business, Aqua Have Spas. The first one done about five years ago, so the update was very necessary, and I love the way it turned out!

WordPress and Mobile Responsive Design

This is a WordPress project which means it’s a powerful branding tool for AquaHavenSpas. It’s also using mobile responsive design so Ryan’s clients can easily stay connected to Aqua Haven Spas on their mobile devices, no matter where they are!

Click 2 Call

One of my favorite features I’ve been setting up on mobile sites is the Click 2 Call feature. This means on a smartphone, a Click 2 Call button appears on the home page so people can go to AquaHavenSpas.com, and instantly call Ryan and his crew, right from the home page of the site.

Visit: AquaHavenSpas.com

I was reading a post from Hostgator (affiliate link) this morning that gave tips on picking the domain name for your business. It had good suggestions, and if you’re at this point it’s worth taking a look. I also covered this subject a while back and go here to get more tips to help the domain selection process.

However, what inspired my post this morning (the one you’re reading) was Tip #5 in Hostgator’s (affiliate link) helpful article. Just wanted to share. Hopefully this will give you a laugh, and also prepare you to not make this mistake.

Taken from Hostgator’s post:

Tip #5 – Avoid unintentional domain hilarity

One final caveat when it comes to choosing a domain name is to carefully review your final selection before hitting the “Register” button for any inadvertently inappropriate language that might pop up.

To see what I mean, consider the real-life URLs for the following legitimate company names:

• Pen Island – “www.penisland.net”
• IT Scrap – “www.itscrap.com”
• Who Represents – “www.whorepresents.com”
• Experts Exchange – “www.expertsexchange.com”
• Speed of Art – “www.speedofart.com”

 

Funny stuff! (unless one of these sites is yours!)

Read the full article on Hostgator’s blog here.

Read more about this in my article here. 

If you recall, last week I reported that there has been a recent onset of WordPress sites being hacked. If you missed that, now might be a good time to give it a quick once-over. (hurry back!)

For the most part things have slowed down, but a slightly lower-level attack has been aimed at popular WordPress plugins, like WPSuperCache and W3TotalCache. I used to use those but quit quite a while ago. I was having conflicts and they interfered and slowed down progress when I was making changes on sites.

Keep Up To Date!

The easiest thing you can do to help protect your site is to make sure your software is always running the most current version. WordPress makes this easy for you. Once you login to your admin area, if any of your plugins, themes, or even WordPress itself has a newer version available, you will see notifications to let you know. Go ahead and click on the automatic update links and buttons and WordPress will do all the work for you.

Keep A Clean House

If you’ve got any themes or plugins on the site that aren’t active, delete them. If you’re not using them they’ll probably get ignored and you won’t be concerned about making sure they’re updated. 

Is Admin Your Username?

If it is, it’s time to change your identity! I know, you’re thinking, “But WordPress doesn’t allow you to change your username!” That’s true, but there’s a way you can get around that.

How to have a different username:

• Login to your admin area and go to Users > Add New.
• Create a new user account for yourself with a new username and password that you’ll want to use. The only thing you’ll need to remember is that you’ll have to use a different email address than the one that’s used for your old account. (If you want you can just put in any email address for now, then switch it back to the one you were using on the old account)
• Logout of your admin area.
• Login using the new account you just created.
• Go to Users > All

Okay, make sure you pay attention here because you don’t want to lose all the posts you’ve created with your old account!

• Delete your old account. (scary, right?!)
• You will be prompted, asking if you want to delete all posts associated with that account or transfer them to a different account.
• Select the transfer option and select your new users account to assign all the posts to.
• Then confirm the deletion of the old account.

That’s it, you’re done. Go very slowly through those last four steps to make sure you don’t lose all your posts!

Well, hopefully this information will save you the headache of having your site hacked, and the cool thing is it’s all easy stuff to do!

You might want to take a look at the post I wrote last week. There are some more valuable tips there.

At one point in the process I was having such a good time that I felt compelled to put a new website together to apply these concepts. Particularly scrollable menu items that help you create a quick, cool one-page website.

I didn’t plan on creating another photography blog/site, but it was an easy target.

In this video I demonstrate how some of these new features might be cool for your next website’s design.

Cool Things I Like About This Design

• It’s different, unique. You’re not seeing it on a lot of sites.
• Scrolling to a section of the home page is much faster than click through to a whole new page.
• The ability to add different backgrounds to each section of the home page.

Do You Like It?

This kind of design wouldn’t necessarily work for every website. But for the sites that it would work for, it’s pretty cool!

Is this something you’d like to see in your next website’s design? Get in touch! I’d be happy to help you with that!

You know how every once in a while you’ll move things around on your website? Maybe rename a page or post? Or maybe delete them all together.

Then a client returns to a link on your site that they bookmarked a year ago, but the page has been removed or renamed and the client sees your 404 Page Not Found page.

If you’re WordPress site is running Genesis (affiliate link), your clients would see something like this…

This page will provide links to every page and a good number of recent posts currently existing on your site. This could be good. This could also be bad.

Why This Can Be Good

Well, it provides a links to every page and a good number of recent posts currently existing on your site. It certainly gives the person an idea of what is there, and maybe they’ll see what they’re looking for. Yay!

Why This Can Be Bad

Well, maybe you’ve got pages on the site that you don’t want the public to see. Maybe you’re developing projects that you don’t want to be revealed yet. If that’s the case you probably don’t want those pages exposed every time someone sees this 404 Error page.

The Solution: A Custom 404 Error Page

Why not create a custom 404 Error page for your site? A page that is unique and can provide more help to your lost customers. A page that doesn’t expose all you have to expose!

Now, if your programming chops are up to speed you could dig into some code and create a shiny new 404 Error page. However, that’s really not as fun as it sounds.

Genesis 404 Page WordPress Plugin

If your WordPress site runs on Genesis Framework (this applies to all my people) (affiliate link, btw) there is an easier solution: The Genesis 404 Page plugin. It’s available from the WordPress.org Plugin Repository.

This plugin allows you to use the text editor to easily create a custom 404 error page the same way you would create a regular page or post. You could add photos, search bars, even video if you want to really entertain your lost guests.

How Can You Get This?

A couple ways. You could go to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/genesis-404-page/ to get the plugin, or you could just:

• login to your WordPress admin area
• go to Plugins > Add New
• type Genesis 404 Page in the search field
• When you see the plugin listed, click Install Now
• Then Activate the plugin.

Once it’s installed and activated:

• go to Genesis > 404 Page
• create your custom 404 page
• publish it
• you’re done!

Check Out My 404 Error Page!

Click here to see an example of what you could do for your site: My 404 Error Page (sorry if it’s a bit obnoxious, I meant well )

Credit Where Credit’s Due

I learned about this cool plugin via another WordPress/Genesis buddy of mine, Bob Dunn. Bob offers a lot of WordPress tips and training and would be a good guy for you to follow if you also love WordPress. Visit Bob’s site at www.bobwp.com.

Most of the people asking that question usually weren’t extremely interested in having to do something manually, so I did some snooping around to find a good, automatic solution.

There’s Plugin For That

I read a reviews of a good number of WordPress plugins to see what people had to say. One particular plugin seemed to be getting a lot of positive attention.

BackWPup

BackWPup came highly recommended from several sources so I decided to take a look for myself. I’ve installed it on my site, set it up, and even ran a manual backup just to make sure it worked. And it did. It worked great!

Schedule Your Backups

You can create a regularly scheduled backup. You can schedule your site to be backed up hourly, daily, weekly or monthly. 

What Can You Backup?

You can select to have the database as well as all the files backed up. You can select any files/folders you don’t want backed up.

Where Do Your Backups Go?

You have several options.

Here’s a shot from the admin panel. You can see that I’ve selected Dropbox

Why did I choose Dropbox?

• It’s a free service,
• it’s easy to use and
• it will make sure my backup files are stored offsite.

You’ll notice the first option is to store your files in a folder on your site. Can anyone tell me why that be a bad idea? Well, you just don’t want to have your backups in the same locations your site is. If the reason you need to restore your site is because there was a problem with the server then the chances are pretty good that your backup files may be lost or corrupted if they’re on that same server.

Dropbox

Dropbox is an awesome free service and if you’re not already using it you should check it out.

• It allows you to share files with friends or business contacts.
• Your Dropbox is a place you can put files that you can then access from any computer or mobile device.
• And it’s a great place to store your WordPress site backup files.

Get your free Dropbox Account! (referral link).

How to Install BackWPup

You can see the plugin’s page in the WordPress.org Plugins Repository here http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/backwpup/. There you could download the plugin and then upload it to your website, but the easiest way to install the plugin is…

To install it, the easiest way is to:

• login to your WordPress admin area and
• go to Plugins > Add New
• enter BackWPup in the search field and click ‘Search Plugins’
• it will pull up the information for BackWPup, click ‘Install Now’
• once it’s finished, click the activation link

Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin you’ll see the BackWPup menu item appear at the bottom of your WordPress admin menu.

Then to get started, go to BackWPup > Add New Job, then just walk through all the steps to create your backup.

Need Help?

I’ll do a screencast soon on installing and setting up BackWPup. It’s pretty simple to use, but I know having a short video can be helpful. Or if this is something you’d like to have on your site but don’t want to deal with setting it up, hire me! I’ll take care of it for you. Just ask.

I’m seeing more people I know start to test the waters on Google Plus these days. That’s awesome! If for no other reason, it’s one of the fastest ways to get your content indexed by Google. (that’s a good thing!)

One of the main complaints I still hear about Google Plus is that Google still doesn’t offer you a vanity URL. A vanity URL is a web address that is usually made up of real words that people can recognize and remember. 

For example, for my Image Perceptions business page on Facebook, the vanity URL is facebook.com/imageperceptions (hey, ‘Like‘ my page! ) It’s short; it’s easy to remember; it makes sense. 

Here is my URL for my business page on Google Plus:

https://plus.google.com/b/113108743941838534013/113108743941838534013/posts (hey, ‘Follow‘ me! ) 

This screencast shows you how you can create your own vanity URL for your G+ page in your website’s hosting cpanel. You’ll be able to create something much more useable, such as the one I created:

plus.imageperceptions.com (that’s a little better than the one above, huh?)

Anyway, get the popcorn ready… Oh yeah, you’ll probably need to watch this in full screen mode to see what I’m doing.

In reading through my stream on Google Plus today I read something interesting, cool and beneficial from Google Analytics.

Google has recently added six realtime widgets in their Analytics dashboards. Analytics power user +dan barker has done the work for you and created 6 free (and useful) dashboards for real-time.

These six new real-time widgets are:

1. Realtime Overview
2. Realtime Channels
3. Realtime Geographic Info
4. Realtime Organic Search
5. Realtime Content
6. Realtime Social Media

To get a better idea of what this means to you, read Dan’s article that goes into detail on these realtime widgets. Exciting stuff!!

If you’re keeping up on what’s new here you will have recently read that I’ve done a redesign of ImagePerceptions.com. I love the new site and am still doing a little fine tuning and tweaking. Today I added Click-2-Call!

Click-2-Call

What Click-2-Call (C2C) does for a site is this:

When you look at a website on a smart phone you will see a large C2C button featured prominently on the home page which allows mobile customers to click the button and call you immediately on their mobile phone. You won’t see this button on a desktop or laptop computer; or even on an iPad – only on a smartphone. How practical and powerful is that?! (I love this stuff!)

Anyway, I’ve added that feature to ImagePerceptions.com. (yay!)

Would you like this kind of connectivity on your website?

Get in touch with me and I’ll be happy to help you with making sure your business has a website that is ready for the rapidly growing mobile market of customers.