WordPress website maintenance can often be a difficult experience for your site’s visitors – especially if they visit your site while you are performing your maintenance tasks. And I wouldn’t recommend avoiding your regular WordPress website maintenance tasks either.

So how do you perform your WordPress website maintenance, and keep your site’s visitors happy? Let’s find out…

When you perform your WordPress website maintenance, the possibility is very high that your site’s visitors won’t be able to see a few or several of your webpages or blog posts. This can happen especially if you are updating your website’s plugins or content. Sometimes, your site’s visitors might experience a bunch of trouble just viewing your site in the first place.

Naturally, this can be quite a disconcerting experience for your site’s visitors – especially if they are first time visitors.

And of course, there is a plugin (or rather several plugins) that can help you resolve this issue. After having fiddled around with many of these plugins, I have settled on one plugin which I like the most. It is called the WP Maintenance Mode plugin.

So without any further ado, lets go have a look at this plugin, and what it can do for you.

WP Maintenance Mode Plugin

A handy plugin to have when you are performing your WordPress website maintenance in the background, this plugin has a bunch of great features. These include:

• Putting up a very attractive image and text combo informing your site’s visitors that your site is currently under maintenance.
• Customizing both the image and the text that appears on that page.
• Setting up a timer which displays how long the maintenance process will last.

Displaying this information to your site’s visitors on your ‘Website is under maintenance’ page helps you to:

• Convey any specific message to your site’s visitors when they visit.
• Gives your site’s visitors a time frame as to how long the site will be down for maintenance.
• Informs your site’s visitors when the site will be up and running again.

While you can use the built-in templates that come along with this plugin, you can also use your own custom created html and css stylesheets too!

And installing and setting up the plugin is pretty much painless.

So, what are the built-in images that are included in this plugin? See the slideshow below to find out.

The Truck

◄ Back

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In Conclusion…

Performing your WordPress website maintenance is highly recommended, it need not be a bad experience for your site’s visitors. With the WP Maintenance Mode plugin, you can easily configure and set up your website’s ‘Site Under Maintenance’ page just the way you want it!

Madhavi Ghare is a Web Content Writer, Blogger, Tarot Card Reader and a Tarot Reading Teacher. She also writes short stories and poems, and is currently trying her hand at writing full length novels.

When she is not writing, she unwinds by drinking a lot of green tea, reading all kinds of books, listening to rock music and watching sci-fi movies.

With the last two blog posts devoted to writing a blog post series, and the contents of an effective blog post series, it is but natural to follow it up with a post about the Organize Series Plugin that makes managing and organizing your blog post series a breeze!

As we’ve seen before, there are several reasons why blog post series make sense, and of course, there are several advantages to having a series of blog posts on your website. And if your website is made with WordPress, then you are in luck – because there is a Plugin for making the management of your blog posts from your series a simple process.

Organize Series Plugin: The Flavors

As it stands, the Organize Series Plugin is available in a variety of flavors – free, and paid.  However, for the most part, the free version does the trick for me, and this is the version that I am going to talk about over here.

The Organize Series Plugin also has a number of Add-Ons, but apart from the Organize Series Publisher Plugin, the rest are paid. Getting the Publisher plugin is not required, but can be helpful, if you’re looking to bulk publish all of the posts from your series at the same time.

Organize Series Plugin: The Features

The free version of the Organize Series Plugin has a number of built-in features that will certainly make the process of managing and publishing a series of blog posts on your WordPress website relatively easy for you. You can read about them on the Developer’s site as well.

But for the sake of simplicity, I am going to talk about the features that I love very much, and which I find the most helpful.

Manage Series Page

The manage series page gives you a straightforward way of adding a new series, writing a brief description of that series, and even giving it a custom icon if you want.

As you can see, it is a pretty straightforward process to put in the information about your series (essentially the central theme / central topic) into the Description box. I genuinely suggest writing out this information for all of your series’. [More on that later.]

Series Options Page

If you are looking to customize the way the series links appear at the beginning and at the end of each blog post, I suggest you spend some time on this page, customizing your output the way you want it. Note that some knowledge of html would be very useful right about here.

On this page, you will truly be able to unleash the true power of customization present within the Organize Series Plugin!

For example, you can scroll down to the bottom of this post to see how I have chosen to show the links to the other blog posts from the ‘Essential WordPress Plugins’ series as a nice list. By default this list shows up at the top of the post, but I have opted to show it at the bottom of the post.

Adding Posts To Series

Adding your blog posts to a series is made relatively easy by putting the menu options right in your Edit page, and in the Admin interface!

Organize Series Plugin Widget

And of course, all of this is made complete with a Widget that enables you to display your series titles in your WordPress website’s sidebar! Here’s a picture of how the widget looks like on my site.

Series Index Page

This is where all the description writing in the Manage Series page will pay off. The Organize Series Plugin will create a page on your WordPress website for each blog post series you write on your website, that will serve as an index for that series. For example, you can check out this page on my site to see how it looks like.

Organize Series Plugin: Videos

Interested in learning how to customize and truly unleash the power of the Organize Series Plugin? Well, then you gotta watch these videos!

Basics of the Organize Series Plugin

Customizing the Organize Series Plugin

About The Organize Series Plugin Widget

In Conclusion…

There are many advantages to writing a series of blog posts. And helping you unleash those advantages, while making the management of your blog post series simple is the Organize Series Plugin for WordPress.

Have you used this plugin? What are your experiences about it? Do share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Madhavi Ghare is a Web Content Writer, Blogger, Tarot Card Reader and a Tarot Reading Teacher. She also writes short stories and poems, and is currently trying her hand at writing full length novels.

When she is not writing, she unwinds by drinking a lot of green tea, reading all kinds of books, listening to rock music and watching sci-fi movies.

In my previous post, I talked about how to go about writing a blog post series. However, every series of blog posts has some very typical contents that enhance the series and help engage the readers who read your blog post series. Today, lets look at the different contents or ingredients that make up an effective blog post series.

Writing a blog post series has a lot of advantages to offer for your website. However, without the essential contents that make the basic framework of an effective blog post series, the entire experience can often become confusing for your site’s readers. These contents or essential ingredients of a blog post series will ensure that your site’s readers – your audience – remains engaged with the series, and are able to navigate through the disparate parts of your blog post series with ease.

So, let’s dive right into it, and find out what the essential contents of a blog post series are:

1. Central Theme or Central Topic

This is the basic central concept that forms the spine of your blog post series. This is essentially the main theme that binds all the different blog posts from your series in one single link.

If you are thinking about writing a series of blog posts, make sure that you have a central theme or topic which is vast enough to justify you writing at least 2 or more posts around it or about it. This way, you will ensure that your blog’s audience will consist of people who are looking to read more, and in depth, about that central theme or topic, and thus will remain engaged with and interested in the blog post series that you write.

Naturally, it goes without saying that this central theme has to be in line with your blog’s purpose in entirety. For example, if you have a blog about fashion trends in clothing, you have to write a series of blog posts related to that basic topic. It, therefore, won’t make sense if you write a series of blog posts about cars.

2. Table of Contents or Navigation

Every blog post series has to have some sort of a navigation link. Not only does this serve as a ‘Table of Contents’ of sorts, but it also helps your blog’s readers to jump right to the article before and after it, or even somewhere in between, if that is what intrigues them.

Of course, it makes sense to have this Navigation Table of Contents placed right at the end of each blog post in that series. Thus, once your reader finishes reading your latest article, and wants to have a look at any article from before, or after that blog post, he / she should easily be able to do so via those navigation links.

3. Continutity

Naturally, all your posts from your blog post series must connect with each other. If you have a good central theme or topic, then writing your blog post series with this kind of a continuity is relatively easy.

If the articles from your blog post series lack this continuity, then it becomes very difficult for your blog’s readers to connect all these disparate pieces of information together, and thus detracts them remaining engaged with your blog post series.

In Conclusion…

A blog post series can be very effective for sharing information about a vast topic or theme. With the right ingredients, you can also make sure that the blog post series delivers all that it promises to your reader as well.

Does your blog post series have these essentials? Do you think that there are some other things which are essential to a good blog post series? Please, do share your thoughts and experiences in the comments section below.

Madhavi Ghare is a Web Content Writer, Blogger, Tarot Card Reader and a Tarot Reading Teacher. She also writes short stories and poems, and is currently trying her hand at writing full length novels.

When she is not writing, she unwinds by drinking a lot of green tea, reading all kinds of books, listening to rock music and watching sci-fi movies.

This is a guest post by Diana Maria.

Your blog is successfully running and is meeting all your expectations to a certain extent. At this juncture, it’s time now to move on to the next level. If you are trying to find answers as to how you should move on to the next level, consider this article a guide.

Today, I am going to help you with best three tips, which will help your blog with moving ahead. For an instant make sure you start thinking like an entrepreneur and consider that your blog has the capacity to make good money. The following tips can help your blog reaching next level, and additionally making it better and attractive for your corporate buyers and readers.

Develop a right blend

Generally companies go with blogs not because they make good money but because they bring in a number of good things. These include attracting targeted audiences, building effective content distribution model or developing competent content that has built good credibility and popularity in the market. Companies couldn’t have achieved this without having a blog. Now you need to think about the kind of companies that would be keen in getting association with your blog. Work out on content strategies that can help you in catering your target audiences at the best. Also, you need to think of ways and ideas of extending your reach of your content. Lastly, you need to even think of making your content better to improve your rankings over the search engines. In this way you need to try different things to get a perfect blend to help your blog to move in your next level.

Build good trust among your readers

You as a blogger will find your voice resonating with your readers along with building a good trust in them. This trust is considered a priceless resource and you cannot afford to lose. Eventually, when you are able to build a good trust among your readers or consumers you are more likely to continue to play your key role in your blogging journey. By this, you not only get your regular revenue but also a number of additional perks in various forms thus making a perfect win-win situation. While doing so, always remember that every step you carry out builds a genuine relationship with your target audiences or readers. Therefore keep on figuring out what your readers want so that you keep on delivering them.

Check where your blogs fits the best in competitive domain

You need to determine your blog’s competitive benefit edges along with finding out where your rivals are going as well. People or companies would see your blog and have a comparison with your rival groups and find out which reaches better to the audiences. Hence it is imperative that you research the competitive landscape and focus on creating a differentiator, which can make you a standalone blog in a rush of many. You as a blogger need to think on lines that will help you in making your blog look different and unique. Your blog should be able to fill the needs of the market to move on to the next level.

In Conclusion…

After running a blog and making it successful, it is recommended to make new targets to reach. These targets will take you to the next level blogging is ease of time.

About the author: Diana Maria is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on technology, Environment and luxury. Beside this she is a nature lover. Recently she bought a Cool flash drives for her house. These days she is trying her hands on a totally different topic i.e. most expensive house.

Madhavi Ghare is a Web Content Writer, Blogger, Tarot Card Reader and a Tarot Reading Teacher. She also writes short stories and poems, and is currently trying her hand at writing full length novels.

When she is not writing, she unwinds by drinking a lot of green tea, reading all kinds of books, listening to rock music and watching sci-fi movies.

This is a guest post by Diana Maria.

There’s no doubt that blogging can contribute significantly towards enhancing your business and its brand value. But, what you really need to do is – realize the importance of indulging in business blogging.

While your business may not feel any need for a blog, there still exists a slew of powerful reasons why it should. Thus to help you there, listed below are some crucial reasons why a business should adopt blogging for reasons apart the brand promotion and better business relationships.

It Builds Traffic

Many business professionals may not realize but having a blog helps one update on a consistent basis and thus have direct traffic to their website. And as more traffic means more sales, indulging in frequent blogging enables you to increase your sales. Professionals can simply link their blog to social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook and develop traffic for their website. Whenever you publish a new blog post, ensure that you are also posting a link to it on your social media account. This will only allow you to intrigue a wider base of audience and develop enhanced business.

It Increases Your Credibility

Being a business professional, you must realize the significance of ‘instilling the credibility factor’. Since people are more likely to buy products from businesses they are familiar with, make sure you build upon the relationship and having a blog can help you tremendously to foster a community and update your site regularly for new information. In fact, you can even ask your visitors to leave their feedback and suggestions and respond accordingly for better business relationships.

It Allows For Better Customer Service

If you create a business blog, you will certainly be enabled to contact your potential customers in an easy, reliable manner. In a similar way, if your visitors feel a dearth of getting in touch with you, they can simply head towards your business blog and have their queries answered. So, make sure you are a part of business blogging as it helps one deliver better customer service which eventually results into great business relationships.

You can also update your customers on new services or products, gain valuable feedback and thereby make improvements where needed.

It Establishes You As An Expert

A business blog allows you to establish your business or brand as an expert in the respective field. So, if you update your site on a regular basis, you will be enabled to develop on your expertise and spread more information on the same. Keeping the blog up-to-date with fresh and valuable content can help you and your readers for carving a particular niche – be it editing, consulting or any other business.

It Gives You A Voice

Lastly yet equally important, business blogging assists in providing you with a voice. By taking advantage of which, you can seamlessly build upon your reputation and endow your brand with the authority and voice it needs to thrive. Since businesses have evolved as highly competitive, you should ensure that you are doing something unique to make it stand. Realizing the importance of business blogging is one of the crucial steps to incorporate in any business model.

Hopefully, the abovementioned aspects will help you know the value of blogging for your business and bring necessary changes, if needed so. While there are several other reasons why your business should include blogging, the stated ones are the most important ones to get started with!

About the author: Diana Maria is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on technology and luxury. Beside this she’s fond of books. Recently an article on Wireless Media Player attracted her attention. These days she is busy in writing an article on luxury yachts.

Madhavi Ghare is a Web Content Writer, Blogger, Tarot Card Reader and a Tarot Reading Teacher. She also writes short stories and poems, and is currently trying her hand at writing full length novels.

When she is not writing, she unwinds by drinking a lot of green tea, reading all kinds of books, listening to rock music and watching sci-fi movies.

Writing a series of blog posts is the best solution for when you have a topic that simply cannot be explained in a single blog post. Also, if you have a topic for your blog, that involves many different sub-topics, then the best way to present that information on your blog is to write a series of blog posts about it. Like a string of pearls, these topics are interconnected with each other, and create a very engaging read for your blog’s audience.

There are several reasons and advantages for writing a series of blog posts on your website’s blog. Let’s have a look at them, and then see how you can go about creating such a series of blog posts on your site.

Reasons To Consider Writing A Series of Blog Posts

There are several good reasons to consider writing a series of blog posts. In a nutshell,

• When you simply cannot explain the topic you want to talk about in a matter of 500 or 700 words, or even 1000 − 1500 words, I would suggest going for a blog post series on that topic.
• If your topic involves several sub-topics, that can be standalone topics by themselves, consider writing a series of blog posts around that central theme.
• When you have topics that are otherwise disparate, but follow a main theme or topic baseline, then you might be looking at a potential blog post series for your website’s blog.

What all of this means is that, when there is typically a simple common thread that links two or more blog posts, and when you cannot put all of the information into a concise format that a blog post requires, then a series of blog posts is a good option to consider.

Advantages of Writing A Series of Blog Posts

Naturally, there are several advantages of writing a series of blog posts. Lets have a quick look at them:

• Better Organization of Ideas: In a series of blog posts, you organize your ideas better, thus presenting them better to your blog’s audience.
• Space For Idea Expansion: Because you are devoting a single blog post to each sub-topic or idea, you get more space to expand on that idea, and provide more information to your blog’s readers.
• Creating Authority: Naturally, all of this helps in creating and establishing your authority over that particular topic, and sub-topic, which is always very good.
• SEO: Of course, all of this helps with your website’s SEO because blog post series rank quite well with search engines because the series of articles helps create a good keyword association between your site and the keywords.
• Creating Eagerness: If you really have a good series of blog posts, then chances are that your blog’s audience will be hanging on to your every word, and looking forward to the next installment. Now, isn’t that what every blogger wants?

With all these advantages at your hand, I think you are more than ready to consider writing a blog post series for your website’s blog, right? So, without much ado, lets dive right into it.

Writing A Series of Blog Posts: How To

The process of writing a series of blog posts can be as simple, and as complicated as you would want it to be. So, I have written down a simple, step-by-step process which I use for my site, and which helps me in the process of writing a series of blog posts for my websites.

• Pick a Topic: Yup, that’s right. Pick a topic. Any topic. The only condition is that the topic’s got to be vast. Think of it as writing a mini-book, where you would break down all the sub-topics into chapters, for example.
• Divide and Conquer: Naturally, once you have your vast topic, write down (in any random order) a list of sub-topics that are included within this main topic. I often use a technique called ‘Mind Mapping‘ for this step, and it helps me a lot to brainstorm and rapidly write down the ideas that spontaneously pop up in my head in this stage.
• Organize: Once you’re done with the brainstorming stage, you can organize the sub-topics in a way that is natural and systematic, and which creates a flow and links the first topic to the next and so on.
• Introductions and Conclusions: Once you are done with the organizing part, just put in a bit for the introduction and conclusion. Of course, it might not fit in with some type of article series to write either or both, but that is a call I want you to take depending on the kind of series you’ve chosen to write.
• Research It: This goes without saying, but yes, you have to research the topic and sub-topics you’ve chosen to write. Chances are that, during the course of your research, you might stumble onto more sub-topics, or other big topics, and you’ll have another list going! There are many ways in which you can do your research on the Internet, and I would strongly urge you to spend some quality time in this step, and not omit it at all.
• Schedule It: Plan out how you are going to publish these posts – do you want to run the series, and not write anything else on your blog while it runs, OR, do you want to have other articles also publish in between as you continue publishing your series blog posts. Again, it will totally depend on the kind of series you’ve chosen to write.
• Write It: Yup! Finally, this is what it all boils down to – writing. Start writing and publishing your blog post series articles!

As you can see, writing a series of blog posts is a fairly straightforward process, and once you get into the groove, you might see blog post series everywhere you go!

In Conclusion…

Writing a series of blog posts is a very interesting way of organizing the blog post content on your website’s blog. There are several very good reasons for considering this, and of course, many advantages to writing a series of blog posts on your blog.

Are you considering writing a series of blog posts on your site? Did you find the process of writing a series of blog posts useful? Did you stumble onto some other steps in the process? Do share your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below.

Madhavi Ghare is a Web Content Writer, Blogger, Tarot Card Reader and a Tarot Reading Teacher. She also writes short stories and poems, and is currently trying her hand at writing full length novels.

When she is not writing, she unwinds by drinking a lot of green tea, reading all kinds of books, listening to rock music and watching sci-fi movies.

Updating your WordPress Plugins and Themes is a very important part of maintaining your WordPress website. Often, this can appear to be a very daunting task. But the recent updates to WordPress have made the process of updating your WordPress Plugins and Themes very easy.

As a WordPress website owner, it is a very important part of your website’s maintenance that you regularly update your WordPress installation – and this includes updating your WordPress Plugins and Themes.

Importance of Updating Your WordPress Plugins and Themes

There are several basic, and very well founded reasons as to why one should regularly update the WordPress plugins and themes. Lets look at those reasons before we get into the ‘how-to’ part of this post.

• Regular updates will ensure that your plugins and themes perform their best, and give you the best of what they are supposed to do.
• Often updates include more features – who doesn’t like more features?
• Updates also mean that some bugs, security related patches and so on are added to your plugins and themes, making your site data more safe.

Most theme and plugin developers are very active members of the WordPress community, and updates to their themes and plugins often involve either or all of the above mentioned factors.

Updating your WordPress Plugins and Themes means that you often get more features and bug fixes for your plugins and themes. These updates also ensure a compatibility with the latest versions of WordPress itself. So yes, it is very important to regularly update them.

Updating Your WordPress Plugins and Themes: How To

The latest versions of WordPress have made it relatively simple and easy to go about updating your WordPress plugins and themes. Here’s a step-by-step process of how to go about updating your WordPress Plugins and Themes:

• The first step, of course, is seeing that updates are available. And that notification is now present right in your dashboard toolbar – right at the top of your WordPress Admin interface.
• The second step is to click on that notification, and you will be taken to the updates page. You can also go to this updates page by moving your mouse over the ‘Dashboard’ icon (looks like a house) and then clicking on ‘Updates’ from the menu that pops up.
• The third step is selecting the plugins and themes you want to update, or selecting ‘Update All’ and clicking on the button to set the update process in motion.
• And finally, you will see an update page, where the results of the process will be displayed. Ta-Da! You’re done!

With such a simple and easy process, now you don’t have any excuse not to update your WordPress Plugins and Themes regularly!

Meanwhile, here are some pictures that should give you a fair idea of the process stages:

WordPress Updates in Dashboard Toolbar

WordPress Updates Step 1

WordPress Updates Step 2

After The Update

Video: Updating Your WordPress Plugins and Themes

And, of course, if you are like me, and want to see how it is done in a video, then here’s a really nice video for you!

In Conclusion…

Updating your WordPress Plugins and Themes is a very important part of maintaining your WordPress website. And the process is fairly easy, and simple to do.

So, what’s your excuse for not updating your WordPress Plugins and Themes regularly?

Madhavi Ghare is a Web Content Writer, Blogger, Tarot Card Reader and a Tarot Reading Teacher. She also writes short stories and poems, and is currently trying her hand at writing full length novels.

When she is not writing, she unwinds by drinking a lot of green tea, reading all kinds of books, listening to rock music and watching sci-fi movies.

If you are a business or a freelancer and you have a presence on the Internet (via a website or a blog), then one of the most essential things for you to do is to define your ideal client. This is because knowing what you are looking for will help you tailor your website’s content accordingly.

Today, lets look at why and how to define your ideal client.

Any business or a freelancer wants to attract new clients. Typically,  one of the commonly used strategies is to make a website on the Internet that showcases the business, skills and services. So, why is it important for you to define your ideal client in this scenario? Lets have a look.

Why You Should Define Your Ideal Client

As I mentioned above, once you know what you are looking for, it becomes easy to find it. As a business or freelancer, you provide a number of products or services. And normally, your product or service has a target audience or client base. Also, most of the clients you are looking for will have certain characteristics that will make them your targeted clients.

When you define this specific client base, you will be in a position to do the following:

• Tailor your website’s content (this includes the written content and the images used) to appeal to the target audience.
• Create content that will serve the specific needs and requirements for your target clients, especially in connection with the products or services you are offering on your website.
• Create content that will appeal to your target client base.
• Offer products or services that are required by your target client base.

In short, if you know what your target client base wants, needs, understands etc., then you can provide it to them.

How To Define Your Ideal Client

There is a very simple way to define your ideal client: Brainstorm and make a mind map!

What You Offer: For this particular exercise, you will need to take into consideration the kind of products or services you offer, and then visualize your ideal client.

What You are Looking For: Then, just write down / mind map the qualities this ideal client might possess. You can go from the general to the specific – let your creativity go wild! Once you have your mind map in place, you can then whittle it down to create a succinct list of qualities that define your ideal client.

Imagine: After that, comes a very interesting step: Visualization. Close your eyes and imagine this ideal client in your mind’s eye. Give him / her a face and a personality. Make him / her real in your imagination. This way, when you create the content on your website, you will be writing to him / her directly, in person. And  it is this twist which will help you to make the content that will appeal to your ideal client.

Define Your Ideal Client: A Quick Example

Let me demonstrate this with an example.

First, here is a quick list of the services that I offer:

• Main Service Offerings:
• Content Writing for Websites and Blogs
• WordPress Installation, Setup and Training

• Incidental Service Offerings:
• Email Newsletter Setup and Content
• EBook Ghostwriting
• Proofreading, Editing of Articles and other content

So, now that I have that list on one side, let me make a list of the qualities I would like in my ideal client.

• What the Client Would Ideally Want:
• Wants to make a website with a blog
• Wants a simple and easy to manage website
• Wants to learn how to manage his WordPress website
• Wants to put out regular newsletters via his website blog
• Wants to put out regular blog posts on his blog

• What the Client Would Ideally Be:
• Small Business Owner
• Freelancer
• Products / Services Provider

• Other Qualities
• Should have an interesting products / service offering
• Should be looking for high quality work
• Should be willing to invest a certain amount of time, money and effort into his website
• Should be straightforward and honest
• Should be okay with web based communication (iChat, Skype and Email)

Now that I have this list, I can tone it down a bit further if I want to, or leave it just as is.

And of course, with this information, I have visualized the image of the ideal client in my imagination. Thus, when I write the content of my site, I write it in such a manner that this ideal client will like and appreciate it.

In Conclusion…

Do you have an ideal client for your business? Have you used a similar process to define your ideal client? If so, have you seen good results from the content that you have created in this manner?

Did you use this process to define your ideal client? Was it useful for you? What other points would you consider while you define your ideal client? Lets talk about all of this in the comments section below.

Madhavi Ghare is a Web Content Writer, Blogger, Tarot Card Reader and a Tarot Reading Teacher. She also writes short stories and poems, and is currently trying her hand at writing full length novels.

When she is not writing, she unwinds by drinking a lot of green tea, reading all kinds of books, listening to rock music and watching sci-fi movies.

Do you want to have certain amount of content or links or images to be constantly displayed on each and every page of your website? If you answered ‘yes’ to this question, then your WordPress sidebar is the perfect place to find all your answers!

Today, lets look at how you can take advantage of your WordPress sidebar to display certain content continuously across all your website’s pages and blog posts.

Your WordPress website has a unique and amazing feature: the WordPress sidebar, which can be very effectively used to display a variety of links and content across all the pages of your website.

WordPress Sidebar: What and Why

Before we delve into the the ‘how-to’ aspect, lets take a quick look at the ‘what’ and ‘why’ aspect of this scenario.

• You might want to display a quick blurb ‘About’ you on every page of your website.
• You might want to put a bunch of links on every page of your website. These can be links to your favorite sites, or other things such as important pages on your website.
• You might want to show an image or a slideshow of images on every page of your website. (This comes in handy when you have a website dedicated to images or photographs, for example.)
• You might want to put links to your social media profiles on the Internet.
• You might want to show off your ‘featured’ products – comes in handy for a shopping website.
• You might want to put a ‘Buy me Coffee’ button or a ‘Donate’ button on your website.

As you have seen, the list of things you might want to display continuously on your website can go on and on. And the reason for having this information on your website’s sidebar is really quite simple:

• Give your website’s visitors instant access to the information you want to highlight.
• Give your website’s visitors a quick glance at certain pertinent information that you want to highlight across your entire website.

WordPress Sidebar: How-To

So, with that quick overview, let us go ahead and look at the various ways you can leverage your WordPress sidebar to make this possible. And the best way you can go about it, is by using your WordPress website’s ‘widgets’ feature. There are a number of built-in WordPress sidebar widgets that come pre-installed with WordPress. Apart from those, you can also install a variety of WordPress sidebar widgets into your WordPress website.

To go to your WordPress website’s widgets section, just navigate to the ‘Appearance’ menu item and click on ‘Widgets’.

WordPress Sidebar Widgets

Without any further ado then, lets look at some of the most useful WordPress sidebar widgets that can make these things happen for you.

Social Media Widget

I have already talked about this widget over here. This WordPress sidebar widget will put in a wide variety of social media links into your WordPress sidebar and help your website’s visitors connect with you across a number of social media websites.

NextGen Gallery Widget

I have written a great how-to post about this widget over here. This plugin also gives you a WordPress sidebar widget, where you can put in a slideshow of your albums or image collections in your WordPress sidebar.

Text / HTML Widget

This is a built-in widget which will help you insert any arbitrary text or html code into your WordPress sidebar. This widget comes in handy when some some websites provide code that needs to be placed in the sidebar of your website.

Pages & Links Widgets

These are 2 separate, built-in widgets. The Pages widget will put links to all your website’s pages in the sidebar, while the Links widget will put the links from your blogroll in the sidebar.

Meta Widget

Another built-in widget, this will put your site’s login and admin links in your WordPress sidebar.

RSS Widget

This built-in, configurable WordPress sidebar widget pulls in RSS feeds from different websites and displays them in your WordPress sidebar. This widget can be quite helpful for those of you who want to display certain news items from other websites on your website.

MailChimp Widget

Although MailChimp provides you with a bunch of code that you can insert into your WordPress sidebar, you can’t quite configure certain aspects of it. Enter the MailChimp Plugin, which allows a lot more in terms of configurability. Now your website’s visitors can easily find your ‘Subscribe to Newsletter’ form on your website!

Twitter Widgets

And if you are a twitter user who wants to show off your tweets and so forth, here are 2 of my favorite Twitter Widget Plugins – Twitter and Twitter Goodies – which you can use, depending on how simple or how complex you want your display to be like.

PayPal Donate Button

This amazing PayPal Donate Button Plugin can really come in handy if you want to put that ‘Donate’ button on your WordPress sidebar.

As you can see, this list is virtually endless too! Ahem! So I think I’ll just stop here.. ;)

In Conclusion…

There are many good reasons why you would want to display a certain amount of or type of content in your WordPress Sidebar, and just as well, there are a plethora of plugins available freely which you can use to put that content in your WordPress sidebar.

So what kind of content do you usually display in your website’s sidebar? What else would you like to display in the WordPress sidebar? Let’s talk about it in the comments section below.

Madhavi Ghare is a Web Content Writer, Blogger, Tarot Card Reader and a Tarot Reading Teacher. She also writes short stories and poems, and is currently trying her hand at writing full length novels.

When she is not writing, she unwinds by drinking a lot of green tea, reading all kinds of books, listening to rock music and watching sci-fi movies.

Web content writers are constantly required to research on the Internet for information. We are constantly challenged by the requirement to write accurate and well written articles for our clients and on our blogs and websites.

Typically, all web content writers gravitate towards conducting their research on the Internet using Internet based Search Engines, like Google. So, lets dive into today’s article, and learn some simple tips that will help your process of research on the Internet to be better, and more accurate.

As I have mentioned above, most web content writers easily end up on their favorite Search Engines (mine is Google, of course) to do their research on the Internet. And when we do put in a search term in Google, we can end up with literally thousands and thousands of web pages and blogs which might carry the information we require.

So how do we end up sorting out the correct information from all that is out there? And best of all, where else on the vast network of the World Wide Web do we look? Let’s find out.

Research on the Internet: Places to Look

Apart from Search Engines, there are many other places where one can source information for our research on the Internet. Let’s go through a quick list of those places. For the sake of simplicity, I am also including Search Engines in that list.

• Search Engines like Google and Yahoo!
• Online Discussion Forums
• Mailing Lists
• Message Boards
• Wiki based sites like Wikipedia

Naturally, you might end up finding links to these sites from your Search Engine. But you can also look specifically for, say, Message Boards or Discussion Forums for your specific topic as well, and the Search Engine will point you in the right direction.

Madhavi Ghare is a Web Content Writer, Blogger, Tarot Card Reader and a Tarot Reading Teacher. She also writes short stories and poems, and is currently trying her hand at writing full length novels.

When she is not writing, she unwinds by drinking a lot of green tea, reading all kinds of books, listening to rock music and watching sci-fi movies.