You’ve survived Mobilegeddon (both the first wave and the second). You’ve schooled yourself in responsive web design and worked tirelessly to ensure your WordPress site looks great on desktop, laptop, smartphone, and whatever newfangled technology is around the corner.

Nice work. But simply resizing your images and adjusting breakpoints isn’t enough to check the “mobile-friendly” box anymore. You need to think about how your visitors use and interact with your site. To quote the straight-shooting Brad Frost, “[they] don’t give a shit if your site is responsive”—they just want something they can navigate with their thumbs.

We’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot lately, having just launched our first “mobile-first” Shopify theme, Handy, and we wanted to share our top “for users, by users” tips for enhancing your WordPress site’s mobile experience. After all, shopping isn’t the only thing people do on their phones these days—they’re reading blogs, looking at websites, and, yes, trying to find the perfect designer for their next big project.

If you want to be in the running, here are a few things you should consider:

Simplify your menus and navigation

The three-click rule states that website visitors should be able to find the information they’re looking for in three clicks or less. That means keeping things simple where your site navigation is concerned. An encyclopedic mega-navigation might look alright on your iMac, but pull it up on your phone and… oof! Cut down the number of items in your navigation, shorten visitors’ paths to your content, and they’ll be tapping like and swiping right every time.

Reform your forms

“Hooray! A form!” said no one ever. To up your chances of getting people to stick around and fill out your form, only include fields that are absolutely necessary. For example, if you’re trying to get them to sign up for your newsletter, all you really need is their email address. (When is the last time you used names, countries and birth dates in your email marketing?) Make sure to leave plenty of space around your form fields, and if you must have a multi-page form, use a progress bar.

Use large text and images

One of the cardinal sins of mobile web design is using text and images too small to decipher. Visitors shouldn’t have to pinch and zoom to see your content (and you know what? They won’t). To keep mobile visitors engaged, keep font sizes large and legible and images big and beautiful (but also optimized so they don’t obliterate your users’ data plans). And think long and hard before you publish that 3,000-word blog post—nobody’s reading your long-winded diatribe on their phone.

Put yourself in your users’ shoes

The thought of making your entire website mobile-friendly can sound like a real pain in the left brain (that’s the technical side) but it doesn’t have to be. Instead of poring over style sheets and stressing over breakpoints, take some time to look at your site from your mobile users’ point of view. Does it load quickly? Is it accessible with the touch of a finger? Is your text large, legible, and to-the-point?

If you can answer yes to the questions above, you’re off to a great start. Keep your mobile users at the front of every design decision you make, and you’ll stay ahead of the pack.

The post Mobile-optimizing your WordPress site—the easy way appeared first on Themezilla.

Ah, procrastination. That old friend who isn’t really a friend, just an unsavoury acquaintance that pops up every time you need to make an appointment or get an oil change or replace that dang porch light that’s been out since Christmas.

And while putting off household chores may be fairly innocuous (what bad could come from leaving a dish in the sink for later?), when it comes to your professional life, procrastination can have real consequences.

Take your portfolio. Whether you’re a writer, designer, freelancer, or you work for an agency, your portfolio is your introduction to the people who want to work with you. It’s the first impression you give, and it can play a major role in clients’ decisions to hire you. Put simply, it’s important!

And yet, preparing and maintaining a professional portfolio is a task a lot of us let slide. You’re an artist, after all. Why spend your day painstakingly updating your portfolio when you could be creating?

If you’re stumped for an answer, you’re in luck, because we’ve got five of ‘em. Here are five good reasons why you should update your portfolio—today.

1. It shows prospective clients you’re active

Competition in the creative community is fierce. Ain’t nobody got time for a designer or photographer who by all appearances hasn’t done anything in the past three years. By weeding out old, obsolete projects and replacing them with shiny new ones, you’ll show prospective clients you’re active and engaged in your field.

2. It establishes trust with clients

Clients want to hire people who are well-respected and well-liked. By sharing examples of previous work and highlighting just how satisfied your clients were, you’ll be able to paint a picture of yourself as a trustworthy professional and an authority in your field.

3. It helps increase your visibility

Even if you’re not looking for work right now, the creative industry is all about getting your work out there. Networking aside (because eugh, networking), a current and dynamic portfolio is arguably the best way of making a name for yourself. Google loves fresh, original content, and you never know who might stumble upon your portfolio on a random Tuesday.

4. It will save you time

You don’t keep your tax forms and receipts in random drawers and closets all around your house, so why would you keep your professional documents scattered around your hard drive? Keeping everything in one spot saves time. The next time someone asks to see what awesome work you did on that high-profile project, you’ll have it at your fingertips. Plus, there’s something about being organized that just feels good.

5. It charts your professional development

You might not think of yourself as a sentimental or nostalgic person, but it’s important to steal some time away from your busy schedule every now and then to reflect on your professional growth. Having a retrospective of past work and activities allows you to see what you’ve accomplished in the past few years, as well as identify strengths, weaknesses and gaps in your skill set. And since you should only be including your finest work in your portfolio, it can give you a real confidence boost when needed.

As with so many things in the digital age, just having a portfolio isn’t enough. You need to tend to it and tweak it as time goes on. If your most recent portfolio entry is more than a year old, it’s time to clear the cobwebs and inject some life into it.  There’s no time like the present.

The post 5 good reasons to keep your online portfolio fresh appeared first on Themezilla.

And just like that it’s December: the season of short, cold days, spastic light displays, and year-end retrospectives.

When it comes to WordPress news, it’s safe to say 2016 has been a big year. From the REST API to PHP7 to Calypso, there’s been no shortage of excitement—at least if you’re a tech-minded WordPress developer.

But what about the rest of us, for whom “Calypso” is nothing more than a syncopated musical genre and a brand of particularly delicious bottled lemonade? What have the Big! Changes! of 2016 meant for WordPress users?

A whole lot, as it turns out—and in today’s post we’re going to bring you up to speed on all of it. (Okay, not all of it, since that would take us ’til January… consider this more of a happy highlight reel.)

1. Streamlined theme setup

WordPress just launched version 4.7 “Vaughan,” and it’s a big step forward—especially when it comes to the initial setup of your theme. The new version allows theme developers to include onboarding content that appears when you first install your theme. This could take the form of a mocked-up contact page, for example, or a pre-populated dropdown menu on the homepage. WordPress 4.7 also comes with new edit shortcuts, which show you the parts of your site that can be customized within a live preview.

2. Better site management

While “Vaughan” is a godsend when it comes to customizing your site, it’s Calypso that revolutionizes the way you manage it. A new interface for managing WordPress content, making updates, and editing site settings, Calypso has been called “a great tool” and “a dream to work with.” It’s especially great for admins with multiple sites to manage, allowing you to update themes, plugins and content across multiple sites at once. You don’t even need multiple accounts and passwords anymore—with Calypso, they’re all in one convenient place!

3. Next-level responsiveness 

With the adoption of true responsive images in late 2015, WordPress went full-on mobile, and they haven’t looked back since. “True responsive images” are images that don’t just look smaller on mobile, they actually are smaller. Every time you upload or link to an image, WordPress creates several different sizes of it and files the copies away for future reference. Then, when someone lands on your site from their phone or tablet, their browser automatically chooses the most appropriate size—saving bandwidth and speeding up load times in the process.

4. Multilingual functionality

Now that WordPress powers more than 26.4% of the web, it needs to be able to speak more languages than ever. The WordPress Polyglots have completely translated the platform into 59 languages as of December 2016, with more than 100 others in the works (if you’re waiting on the Bengali version, it’s just about ready to go!). This means more and more people will be able to use WordPress in their native language, which can only be a good thing.

5. Rock-solid security

Since launching earlier this year, HackerOne—a “vulnerability and bug bounty platform” created in conjunction with Facebook, Microsoft and Google—has found and patched thousands of security holes in WordPress. Paid hackers are constantly hunting down and resolving security issues, so it’s important to keep your WordPress installation up-to-date and protect yourself from known issues.

Summing up!

It’s been a big year for WordPress, and it seems like a safe bet to say that 2017 will be even bigger. The platform is on the cusp of some huge positive changes, which will affect its codebase, interface, and, most importantly, users like you!

How have the changes in this post affected you? What changes would you like to see in 2017? Don’t be shy! Hit us up in the comments!

The post A look at all the biggest WordPress news of 2016 appeared first on Themezilla.

There are a lot of articles about driving more traffic to your WordPress site. And given that traffic is to websites what votes are to an election candidate (i.e. the more, the better), that makes a certain amount of sense.

But what about once you’ve reached your goal of driving hundreds, no thousands, no millions of visitors to your site every month? How do you ensure that your site (or your candidate, though we’d best leave that one alone) is up to the task?

That’s what today’s post is about. While WordPress is certainly capable of managing huge amounts of traffic, its developers are the first to admit “there are limitations to what any website platform can do by itself.” Luckily, you can do certain things to ensure your site keeps performing at its best—and we’re going to share five of them.

Update your software

One of the easiest and most effective ways of tackling traffic surges is to make sure your applications are up to date. We don’t just mean your WordPress installation—though that’s important, too—we mean your plugins and theme and anything else you installed six years ago and haven’t touched since. Not only will staying au courant equip your site to handle increased traffic, it will enhance security, eliminate bugs, and give you access to all the latest features. Not a bad deal for a few clicks a couple times a year!

Clean up your database

Most people put off cleaning their database about as long as they procrastinate snaking the shower drain, but that doesn’t make it okay. Stored data from site revisions, drafted posts, pingbacks, and plugins can overload your server and cause it to fail when traffic spikes. To prevent that from happening, weed out unnecessary data from your database and toss it in the trash. Turn off or uninstall any unused plugins or themes, and scrub your wp_postmeta and wp_commentmeta tables of any lingering junk.

Upgrade your hosting package

Shared hosting is great option for rookie bloggers and sites with low traffic, but if you’re starting to see performance lag every time you get more than a handful of visitors at a time, it’s time to trade up. A virtual private server or high-powered dedicated server will guarantee that your site runs faster and better, while also providing services like automatic backups, security features, and technical support. Sound like something that’s worth an extra few bucks a month? We certainly think so.

Get to know your caching options

Caching could be what keeps your site online when traffic takes a sharp turn for the stratosphere. How so? Well, caching plugins like W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache and Varnish Cache create static HTML copies of pages and temporarily store them until they’re needed. That means the next time someone visits your site, they’ll already have the majority of the necessary files stored in a cache and won’t need nearly as much information to load the page. For obvious reasons, this comes in particularly handy when visitor numbers go up (and up, and up!).

Take advantage of service-oriented architecture

If you’re preparing for truly historic traffic levels, you might consider splitting your WordPress application into multiple layers and serving each one independently. This approach is known as service-oriented architecture. While most hosting plans take your site and stick it on a single machine, a service-oriented setup splits it up and assigns it to multiple layers. This means your site can handle more traffic and run faster, while you can more easily identify kinks in the system and iron them out.

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An increase in site traffic isn’t something that should scare you. After all, more traffic is good! It means people are interested in what you’re offering, and you’re growing your reach. Take the steps outlined in this post, and you’ll be able to confidently welcome hordes of new visitors without the threat of downtime.

How do you manage traffic on your WordPress site? Share your experiences with us in the comments!

The post 5 ways to prepare your WordPress site for more traffic appeared first on Themezilla.

If you’ve been using WordPress for a while, you probably think you have a pretty good grasp on how to use it. You can create a page, add some content to it, and hit publish. You might even know a thing or two about managing comments and SEO. What else is there, right?

In a word: lots. WordPress comes with a boatload of awesome features, and is constantly adding new ones. It’s virtually impossible to promote all the bells and whistles it contains, meaning many features end up getting overlooked. But that doesn’t mean they’re not important or that they can’t make managing a website a whole lot easier!

In today’s post, we’re sharing five under-utilized WordPress features to help you get the most out of everyone’s favourite CMS.

In-line linking

Adding links and embedding content can be a hassle with other platforms, but not so with WordPress. Instead of hitting the Insert/Edit link button above the editor and pasting the link into the popup, you can simply select the text and press CTRL+V. The editor will automatically convert it to a link. Similarly, if you want to embed a YouTube video or image gallery into your post, all you need to do is paste a supported URL.

Plain text pasting

Raise your hand if you’ve ever tried to copy something from an external source only to have it go all screwy when you paste it into your post editor. Fortunately, WordPress has a fix: the plain text posting option. You’ll find it under the toolbar toggle in your post editor—it’s the clipboard-shaped icon with a “T” on it. Before pasting anything into the visual editor, activate plain text pasting so you can add your content without any troublesome, format-messing code.

Drag and drop images

Are you still clicking the “Add Media” button every time you want to add an image to a post? There’s an easier way! Just drag the image—from your desktop, from a Finder window, from wherever—and drop it into your post editor. WordPress will automatically upload it to your media library, prompting you to write a caption, add the alt-text, and select the size and alignment. Easy!

Distraction-free writing

The Internet is a notoriously distracting work environment, filled with an endless stream of funny videos, status updates, and cat GIFs. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to eliminate those distractions so you could buckle down and focus on the task at hand? Well, there’s an app for that—or rather, a mode. Distraction-free writing mode temporarily hides the WordPress sidebar and panels, leaving you with a blank canvas to creatively and unimpededly fill with type. Just click the button under the visual and text tabs to activate it and give your productivity a boost.

Markdown and keyboard shortcuts

Want to write and format your posts faster? Then you need to inject a little Markdown in your life. Markdown is is a lightweight markup language that lets you add formatting like headers, bold, bulleted lists, and more to plain text. It’s super simple: hashes are for titles, stars and dashes make lists, em-dashes expand to full horizontal lines. For an entire list of WordPress’s keyboard shortcuts, open the post editor’s toolbar toggle and click on the question mark to the right.

Have we missed any WordPress features or shortcuts that you regularly use? Comment below to let us know!

The post 5 under-used WordPress features to make your life easier appeared first on Themezilla.

Finding good WordPress hosting can be a real pain in the you-know-what. You need a solution that will do your content justice, handle traffic spikes without crashing, and provide support to get you back up and running if things go off the rails at 2 a.m. Ideally, it won’t cost an arm and a leg either.

That might sound like a lot to ask, but in an industry where the landscape is constantly changing and the competition has never been tighter, it is possible. The only trouble is, there’s still an awful lot of options out there and it’s easy to get lost if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

In today’s post, we’ve set out to simplify matters by outlining some of the key features you should pay attention to when selecting a WordPress hosting company. Keep these 4 S’s in mind, and you won’t go astray!

Speed

In an era of notoriously short attention spans, speed matters—a lot. According to a survey by Forrester Consulting, 47 percent of Internet users expect a website to load in under two seconds. Caching plugins will go a long way towards speeding up the load time of your site, but even the best can’t compete with the custom caching solutions offered by hosting providers like SiteGround. In one recent comparison, SiteGround posted page load times of 500ms—41 percent faster than average, and certainly among the fastest out there.

Scalability

You might be small now, but all it takes is one viral post to send your site into the stratosphere. You need a host that can handle massive traffic spikes without bottoming out at the most critical moment. As “the world’s most scalable WordPress hosting solution,” Pagely is a great option for sites on the rise. It’s built on the Amazon Cloud, meaning hosting is provided through distributed data centres, so all it takes is a few quick commands to allocate more resources to your site.

Support

Good support is like a good insurance policy: you never think you need it until there’s an emergency, and then it’s everything. With WordPress now powering more than a quarter of the web, it shouldn’t be hard to find a company that specializes in the platform, but double check to be safe. One obvious choice here would be WP Engine, a company that many regard as the gold standard of WordPress hosting. They’re a tad more expensive than some of the other options, but for good reason: their support team is dedicated to nothing but WordPress.

Security

As the world’s most popular content management system, WordPress is a prime candidate for hackers looking for security loopholes. One of the biggest vulnerabilities to WordPress users is running an out-of-date version of WordPress. Many people simply don’t update their core files, even though all it takes is a click of the mouse a few times a year. Most managed hosting providers ensure core files are always au courant, giving you peace of mind and time to focus on other things. 

The post The 4 S’s of a good WordPress hosting service appeared first on Themezilla.

There was a time, not so long ago, when a lively comments section was vital to running a successful blog. Comments created value for bloggers and their community, providing space for additional viewpoints, reactions and questions. Sometimes the comments sparked a conversation so good that bloggers would append notes or updates to their posts to ensure that everyone would see the additional insight.

But the times, they have a-changed. Today’s comment sections are frequently filled with spam, overrun by trolls, or disabled altogether (see Copyblogger, Popular Science, The Daily Beast, and any small-town newspaper that knows what’s good for it). Vibrant, thought-provoking conversations have been replaced with unenlightened observations and insults, leading many to the logical conclusion that the good old days of blog commenting are over. Yes, blog commenting, like email and RSS feeds and SEO before it, is D-E-A-D.

But is it really? Or has the conversation just shifted? As content creators, is there something we can do to generate more discussion and engagement with our articles and topics? In today’s post, we’ll try to find some answers.

Where did all the comments go?

For years, comment sections were part and parcel of the online experience. They were everywhere, from the New York Times to CNN to Perez Hilton. But as the internet has grown—and as the number of people using it has exploded—our attention has fractured. Whereas once we subscribed to only a handful of blogs, now thousands of them vie for our attention, not to mention our overflowing inboxes and the multitude of other online tasks. Who has time to compose a substantive comment when there are bills to pay, investments to check, and flights to book?

But just because people aren’t taking the time to comment on blog posts in the designated section doesn’t mean the conversation has stopped. As author and content expert Ann Handley put it, “Comments and conversation are not dead. But what is dead is the expectation that either happens in the place you want them to.” Sites that are shutting down their comment sections are simply shifting the conversation to where they see the most interaction—mainly social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.

What’s a blogger to do?

In a 2014 survey by Impact, nearly three quarters of respondents said they were more likely to discuss online content on social media than in the publisher’s comments section. With numbers like that, it might be time to adopt an “if you can’t beat them, join them” attitude. Take a page out of Copyblogger’s book and move the conversation to social media—even if that means sending readers away from your blog.

Figure out where your articles are being shared, and become more active on those networks. Make a routine of cross-posting everything you write, and look for creative ways to make those posts as enticing and interactive as possible. If you can strike a chord with readers through a tweet or Facebook post, you’re much more likely to get them thinking and commenting. And when readers do take the time to leave comments, make sure you respond to them. After all, if you don’t fuel the fire, it’ll fizzle out.

Why all this might actually be a good thing

It was nice when blog comments were thriving, and you can pine for those days all you want, but the fact is that the shift to social media is actually great for blogs. You can still have the same conversations you used to have in the comments, only instead of getting read by a limited group of dedicated readers, they’ll get read by virtually everyone you know, plus all their friends, acquaintances, colleagues and relatives.

Another positive side effect of the shift to social media is that it cuts down on spammy, nasty comments on your posts. As NPR—which is closing comments on its website as of today—recently noted, “The Facebook discussions that do take place tend to be more civil, most likely because users are required to use their own names.” By removing the mask of anonymity that most blog commenting systems allow, you force commenters to stand behind their words—or face the very real consequences of trolling people on social media.

Summing up

While it’s way too soon to declare blog commenting officially “dead,” it’s safe to say things are changing. People may not be leaving the same thoughtful, substantive responses they once did in your blog’s comment section, but they’re still talking, and they always will be. Comments and conversations are still alive and well—you just need to find out where the conversation is happening, and focus your energies there.

The post Is blog commenting really, truly dead? appeared first on Themezilla.

Have you ever started to build a WordPress site for a client and realized—after you’ve already invested a good amount of time and money—that you’ve chosen the wrong theme? Or that the theme your client has selected is actually lacking many of the fundamental features they require? With deadlines looming and budgets tightening, a last-minute change may not be feasible and you could get stuck delivering a site that neither you nor your client is entirely satisfied with.

We want to help you avoid that unpleasant scenario. We know how difficult it can be to find the right theme for your client—especially these days when the options are virtually endless—but it is possible. By determining project requirements early on, narrowing your search, and comparing potential themes before you commit, you’ll maximize your chances of selecting the right theme and minimize your stress and second-guessing.

Sort out the important details

Before you even so much as glance at a theme, it’s crucial that you take the time to go over the project objectives with your client. What is the purpose of the site? Who is it for? How do you want to structure it? Try to be as detailed as possible in your answers. It might not even be a bad idea to sketch out a site map at this point so you can start to think about the functionality different pages might require. This will also get your client thinking about the content they’ll need to provide.

Decide on a list of must-haves

Once you and your client are on the same page about what you’re building, it’s up to you to identify a list of essential theme features. Some of the most important things to consider are site navigation (do you need mega-nav to handle dozens of menu items?), image requirements (do you have the photos to fill a site-spanning hero area?) and header treatment (is its size and position compatible with your client’s name and logo?). Create a list of 3-5 essential features and start shopping.

Limit your search

As mentioned earlier, there are literally thousands of WordPress themes on the market, and even if you limit your search to the ones that have your desired features, there’s still going to be thousands to comb through. Because of this, we recommend considering the themes of just two or three providers you trust. Not only does this narrow the field substantially, but it will make your life a whole lot easier when it comes to digging into the codebase. (And by only using reputable theme providers, you’re ensuring your client has someone to call if things go awry—someone that isn’t you!)

Look under the hood

Whether or not it made your list, clean, intelligible code is a must-have for any theme, and unfortunately, it’s not as common as you might expect. Shoddy, deprecated code is a nightmare to customize and can result in broken layouts and plugins, corrupted data, and worse. By taking the time to check out the code before you commit, you’ll have a better idea of what you’re getting yourself into, and save everyone a lot of grief down the road.

Keep your eyes open

The WordPress landscape is forever changing and it’s important to keep apprised of the latest trends and developments. Instead of trying to implement the latest, greatest features and styles into each and every project, set aside some non-billable hours once or twice a month to see what’s new and check out what other designers are doing. We hate to admit it, but sometimes the best ideas come from your competitors!

The post Picking the best WordPress theme for your client appeared first on Themezilla.

Ahhhhh, summer. The season of backyard barbecues, trashy beach reads, and FOMO-inducing Instagrams of coworkers’ cottage vacations. But summer is also a great time for WordPress site updates—especially if you’ve been putting off a bunch of important tasks all year.

Why? Because unless you work in, say, ice cream sales or pool repair, the pace of business generally drops off in July and August, when people are ducking out of work early to catch some rays instead of idly surfing the web while they lament their wet commute home. This means you can execute your changes during a low-traffic time just in case anything goes awry.

It also means you can get ahead of your competition by revamping your website while everyone else is kicking back with a cold one. Come September, you’ll be sitting pretty in your back-to-school best, and they’ll still be shivering in their wet swimsuits.

Here are five super simple things you can do to freshen up your site this summer.

Back your site up

Everyone knows that regular site backups are important, but how many of us actually do it when BackupBuddy reminds us it’s time? Be honest—if you haven’t created a copy of your site in the last six months, it’s time to back that thang up. Backups ensure that you have a course of action should something go wrong with any of the other items on this list (besides flailing your arms in the air and shouting at your screen).

Audit your database

Database cleanup is another task that most people put off far longer than they should. Now is the time to haul out all that unnecessary stored data from site revisions, drafted posts, and pingbacks, and kick it to the curb. Deactivate and uninstall any unused plugins or themes sitting unused, and purge your wp_postmeta table for any lingering data there. Shedding this deadweight will help speed up your site and allow it to run more efficiently.

Update static page content

Nothing says “neglected website” like outdated, irrelevant information on high-traffic areas like your About and Contact pages. (How long has it been since you relocated your office?) Take the opportunity to bring visitors up to speed on your portfolio, accomplishments and skill set. Reach out to past clients to obtain testimonials. After all, one of the primary aims of your site is to establish trust with your visitors—and stale, outdated content does just the opposite.

Pump up the SEO

As much as we tout the simplicity of SEO, we know firsthand how easy it is to forget to fill in the meta description on a post or set the alt-text on an image. Take some time this summer to revisit your blog archives and make sure you’re optimizing each post. A plugin like Yoast is great for this, providing instant feedback on post titles, subheadings, keywords, and more. While you’re at it, consider adding some internal links between new and old content. The more you link, the better your chances of being found by search engines.

Refresh your theme

If you’ve been using the same theme for longer than a year or so, you might be itching for a change. Maybe the theme you’re currently using doesn’t support the latest WordPress functionality. Maybe you want more control over the design of your site. Whatever it is, summer is the perfect time to slap on a fresh coat of paint and strut your stuff. Browse our theme catalogue and see if anything catches your eye!

The post 5 easy ways to freshen up your site this summer appeared first on Themezilla.

Some people don’t like to read. If you’re an obsessive blogger who works in a vacuum, that might come as a bit of a shock, but it’s true. With so many other things to do (climbing mountains, traveling the world, taking risks, watching Netflix), people just aren’t reading like they used to.

Sure, there are still some of us who read “for fun,” but many others only read when they have to—you know, like when they need to know how long to cook their frozen pizza. For them, reading is about figuring out how to do something, or learning about something that’s happened. It isn’t fun, and it isn’t something they’ll do for any longer than necessary. Give them an excuse to stop and they will.

A few weeks back, we covered several factors that can help or hurt your site in our post on A/B testing. But one we glazed over is actually one of the most important when it comes to pleasing reluctant readers: typography. In today’s post, we’re going to share some tips for getting it right, and hopefully turn some of those Haven’t Read a Book Since High School-ers into avid readers—of your blog, at least.

Tip #1: Less is more

Now that the idea of web-safe fonts is no longer a serious consideration, it can be tempting to go hog-wild with fonts and typefaces (here’s a good explanation of the distinction). But don’t forget that each font you add will need to be downloaded and rendered by your reader’s browser, meaning the more you use, the more time it will take to load your site. Five or six fonts (not typefaces) is more than enough to create typographical interest without bogging down your site.

Tip #2: Don’t fall for fancy fonts

Yes, typography is about creating text that fits the unique personality and style of your site, but more importantly it’s about creating text that is clean and readable. If you really must go fancy, limit embellished text to branding and top-level headings, and use simple, easily deciphered styles for lower-level headings and body text. Ian Yates of Tuts+ recommends thinking of your fonts as table guests at a wedding reception: “One entertainer is usually enough, as too many strong personalities can make the atmosphere awkward, like an episode of Big Brother.”

Tip #3: Be generous with font size

Size 12 Times New Roman may be standard in Microsoft Word and Pages, but use it on your website and you’re bound to lose readers. Remember that your primary goal with typography is to make your content readable. If your content can’t be read without squinting, odds are it won’t be read at all. 

Tip #4: Use the Golden Ratio

It’s a fairly common problem that you’ve no doubt experienced yourself: you’re reading a line of type and you find yourself starting to read the same line for a second or even third time. Sometimes it’s because you’re bored, but more often it’s because the lines of text are just too damn long. To keep eyes on your content, try to keep lines of text to 11 to 14 words on average, or use Pearsonified’s Golden Ratio Typography Calculator to optimize your paragraph width.

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Getting people to read what you write isn’t easy, but by following these tips and being a little more thoughtful about how you use fonts and typefaces, you can transform your type and attract more readers to your blog. Just remember: don’t let the type get in the way of your message!

The post Blogging basics: 4 tips for better typography appeared first on Themezilla.

Your gut is a good guide for a lot of things—when to eat, what to eat, whether it’s a good idea to call your ex—but when it comes to the design of your website, it can be pretty unreliable.

Now, that’s not to say you have bad taste or don’t know your users. But questions of where to put your navigation, if a particular hero image is effective, and whether you should use a red button or a blue button—these are matters best decided not by your gut, but by quantifiable data.

In today’s post, we’re going to show you how to get that data using an incredibly useful and infinitely adaptable method called A/B testing. Let’s dive right in!

What is A/B testing?

A/B testing simply means pitting two versions of something against each another and seeing which comes out on top—kind of like a cockfight, only with less squawking. These tests let you compare your original site (variant A) to a version you’ve adjusted based on assumptions and/or research telling you it will work better (variant B). If B wins, you can do a little dance and make the modification permanent. If A wins, you should probably try something else.

What’s so great about A/B testing?

Rather than trusting your gut or waiting for someone to volunteer an opinion, A/B testing allows you to trial changes before committing to them. As Torque Magazine writes, “It enables data-backed decisions and a shift from ‘I think’ to ‘I know.’” When you know how your audience will react before you pull the trigger, you’re much, much more likely to make the right decision.

What does the A/B testing process look like?

You begin the A/B testing process the same way you would a ninth-grade science experiment: with a defined goal. What is it that you want to accomplish? Do you want to sell more products? Get more people to hire you? Increase your readership? Your goals will become the metrics you use to determine which variant works best for your site.

Like any scientist worth her salt, you also need to develop a hypothesis, or an “if x, then x, because x” statement. For example, if you’re testing the colour of your CTA, you might write, “If I change the colour of my CTA from red to green, then I will convert more browsers to buyers because green means ‘go.’”

With hypothesis in hand, you can start creating variations of the site elements you want to test. In this example, you’d create a green CTA button. You might also create blue and orange versions while you’re at it, but make sure you don’t go overboard. (Don’t create a version that’s both purple and sparkly, because if it wins, how are you to know if it’s effective because it’s purple or because it’s sparkly?)

Now all that’s left to do is run your experiments. There are lots of tools to help with this, and we’ll get to those in a minute, but first let’s talk a bit about the types of things you could be testing…

What are some example A/B tests you can run?

You can test virtually anything on your site, but you might want to start by looking at your analytics. Can you identify any weaknesses? Are there pages you think are underperforming? If your goal is to increase the number of sign-ups, you might want to run a few tests on your sign-up page: the length of the form, the types of fields, the privacy disclaimer, etc.

Here are a few of the more commonly tested elements you might consider:

• Call-to-action buttons: placement, copy, colour, size
• Navigation: sticky vs. static, primary vs. secondary
• Layout: headlines, sidebars, footers
• Content and copywriting: length, tone, typography
• Forms: fields, length, privacy, social proof
• Advertising: pop-ups, banner ads, content, level of annoyingness

ConversionXL recommends starting with the “low-hanging fruit” (presumably the colours and sizes of various elements) and working your way up from there. We think this is good advice. Don’t run before you can walk, etc.

A few recommended tools and plugins

Okay, now that you’ve got a handle on what goes into A/B testing, let’s look at some of the awesome tools and plugins you can use to pull it off. There are a bunch of people who have already written about this (see here and here and here and here) so we’ll keep it brief and play favourites. Here are our top three:

• Google Analytics Content Experiments: Our top pick because, odds are, you’re already using some of GA’s incredible functionality on your site. With installation and setup out of the way, you can get right down to testing—and not just A/B testing, but A/B/C/D/E/F/G/H/I/J testing (it allows for up to 10 variants to be tested at once). For the price—free!—it can’t be beat.
• Optimizely: Ideally suited to beginner A/B testers, Optimizely makes it easy to set up experiments using its WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) page editor. To get started, simply add their testing code to your site. There’s even a plugin to help you! It’s free for up to 50,000 visits a month, so you can learn the basics while you build your audience, and graduate to a more robust plan when you’re ready.
• Nelio for WordPress: This one costs money, but it’s worth shelling out for if you run a larger site. Unlike the other options in this list, Nelio allows you to set multiple goals, as well as compare different themes, landing pages, custom post types, widgets and CSS variations. Nelio also has the advantage of storing all its data and calculations on an external server, meaning its extensive functionality won’t be a drag on your site. 

Wrapping up

A/B testing is about knowing your audience, plain and simple. Not “thinking” or “guessing” who they are or what makes them tick, but actually knowing. Equipped with real, quantifiable data, you’ll be able to make better decisions, provide more value, and maximize your site’s potential.

What are you waiting for?

The post How to use A/B tests to optimize your website appeared first on Themezilla.

The creative community is big. Really big. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of designers, developers, writers, photographers, interior decorators, fashion consultants and landscape architects all vying for attention. It can be hard to stand out—especially when everyone is so damn talented.

That’s why we created Zinc, a powerful and pliable WordPress theme for agencies and creative professionals wanting to make an impression. With Zinc you can build exactly the site you want, from the layout of your homepage to the colour of your icons and image overlays. No prescriptive templates, no cookie-cutter design features, just a rock-solid, infinitely customizable theme. Neat, hey?

Zinc’s standout features start on the homepage, where you can mix and match a variety of stylish elements to communicate the narrative of your agency. Want to draw attention to a new and noteworthy project? Put it front and centre in an image gallery or multimedia portfolio post. Have a particularly glowing review you want potential clients to see? Create a super-slick testimonial section. Your creativity knows no bounds, and neither should your homepage.

Another place Zinc really shines is its innovative and robust portfolio section. While many portfolio themes limit you to a block of text and some photos, Zinc lets you showcase your best work with galleries, videos, call-outs, and one ultra-cool animated stat counter. You know you want clients to know just how many bright ideas and caffeinated beverages went into that package design!

We’re super excited about everything Zinc can do, but we’re even more excited about what you can do with Zinc. If you’re down to make your agency theme stand out from the crowd, go grab Zinc now!

The post Introducing Zinc, a super-powerful agency theme appeared first on Themezilla.

It’s a question for the ages: to www or not to www? For years, people have been asking if there’s any difference between the two, which one (if any) is better for SEO, and whether or not they need to change their site address.

Not surprisingly, the internet is full of opinions on the topic. On one side, you have the yes-www’ers who argue that using www “makes you more prepared to handle the challenges of a growing website beyond a single server.” On the other, you have the no-www’ers who insist that using www is “redundant and time-consuming.”

While we can sympathize with both sides, our official opinion is that it doesn’t really matter (Google agrees!). For the average blogger or freelancer or even agency, there is absolutely zero advantage to using www or not. That said, there is a technical difference between the two, and there’s a very good reason why you shouldn’t be using both.

Appearances can be deceiving

It’s pretty common these days to be able to access a website from both the www and non-www version of its URL. If you want to visit our website, for example, you can type in “http://www.themezilla.com” or the “naked” version, “themezilla.com”—either way, you’ll end up on our homepage.

Now, these URLs may look similar—many would argue they’re as good as identical—but they’re not. In fact, they are completely separate sites, and Google treats them as such.

To capture variations in URL formatting, some people set up their site at a handful of similar but different addresses, only to be penalized by search engines for duplicate content. Instead of competing against yourself for page rankings, a much better approach is to set up a 301 permanent redirection from one version of the URL to the other (we redirect all themezilla.com traffic to http://www.themezilla.com).

Getting canonical

“Canonicalization” is a big word that Google may or may not have made up to refer to “the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices.” No matter which format you decide to use, the important thing is to be consistent and help search engines determine the “canonical version” (ie. the version that best represents your entire site).

For example, don’t send half your links to http://www.yoursite.com and the other half to yoursite.com. Instead, pick the URL you prefer and always use that format for your internal links. Not only does it keep things simple for search engines, it stops the page rank and link juice from getting divided between what Google thinks are two separate sites.

Picking your poison

While URL formatting is a matter of personal preference, there are a couple technical differences we alluded to earlier that might affect sites with very high traffic.

Basically, when you use a non-www or naked domain, and you also have several subdomains, it can become difficult for servers and cloud services to update DNS records. The other issue that can occur with naked domains has to do with cookies: without the www, the cookies get sent to all subdomains, slowing down access to static content and tripping up caching.

If this all sounds like Greek to you, don’t worry. These are highly specialized situations that really only affect extremely large websites receiving millions of page views per day. (We hear the chorus of yes-www’ers countering, “But who doesn’t want their site to get that large?”)

Summing up

For our site, we default to the www domain because we have a soft spot for end-of-alphabet characters, and because it makes us feel like we’re a part of something bigger than ourselves.

But you may hate the letter “w,” or you may just prefer your URL to be naked. And that’s okay! No one option is unequivocally better than the other, and we encourage you to be your own webmaster and decide which is best for you.

The post Should you use “www” in your URL or not? appeared first on Themezilla.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is often made out to be a convoluted, mystifying, and secretive discipline that only trained specialists and enlightened “gurus” can make sense of. And when it comes to claiming prime real estate for an ultra-competitive search term like, say, “SEO,” there might be some truth to that.

But SEO isn’t rocket science. Or contract law. Or anything else that requires specialized knowledge and intensive study. On the contrary, SEO is simple, intuitive, and accessible to anyone with a website and the will to learn a handful of simple techniques (most of which involve nothing more than putting words in boxes).

In this seventh instalment in our Blogging Basics series, we’ll introduce you to five dead-simple SEO practices that will help boost your search rankings, expand your readership, and give you a happier, healthier blog overall.

Pick the right keywords

You might not think you know how search engines work, but you know. After all, you’ve conducted some 8,145,942 searches in your lifetime, and each one has taken the same course: you enter some words in a search box, hit enter, and a half-second later you’re presented with pages of results that match your terms. 

So it’s pretty important that you pick the right keywords. But how? One way is to put yourself in your user’s shoes and try to divine what they’re going to type (not recommended). Another is to use Google’s Keyword Planner. You’ll be able to search for your topic, find the top search terms associated with it, see how competitive they are, and watch how they trend over time.

You should decide which keywords and phrases you want to go after, then think about how you can add them to your site. WordPress SEO by Yoast allows you to set a focus keyword for each of your posts and tallies up how many times you’ve used it (more is better—to a point). It’s also got some other useful features, so if you aren’t already using it, you should probably go download and install it, like, now.

Write accurate, SEO-friendly post titles (and permalinks)

Post titles are one of the most important components of good SEO. Not only do they compel browsers to become readers, they’re also one of the main things search bots look at when crawling your site. If possible, try to fit in a keyword or two without exceeding Google’s 70-character limit.

It’s also a good idea to set your permalinks (also known as web addresses or URLs) to include the descriptive keywords you’ve selected instead of a mishmash of random dates and figures (as they often are by default). The keywords in the permalink will be highlighted in search results—plus, if you ask us, “themezilla.com/beginner-seo” looks a lot better than “themezilla.com/?p=63/u/2016-04-21/xyz”. You can edit the permalink for each post below the title in the backend of each post.

Make the most of categories and tags

When you’ve got a dynamite post you’re excited to publish, it can be tough to remember to tag and categorize it—but Google will reward your diligence. As we wrote in our post on WordPress categories and tags, “Thoughtful classification facilitates navigation (and good user experience) but it also offers up opportunities for increased search traffic and engagement that too often go to waste.” Basically, any time you can sneak your keywords into your blog without looking like you’re trying too hard, do it!

Master meta descriptions

The jury’s still out on whether meta descriptions actually give your site a lift when it comes to search rankings, but setting a meta description tag for each post you publish is still a good habit to get into. Why? Because even if Google doesn’t use the keywords in meta descriptions to determine its search rankings, it still bolds them if they match a user’s search terms. It’s an extra 155 characters you can use to hook your prospective reader.

Should you decide against setting a meta description for the pages you want to rank for, Google will set it for you—a snippet from the first couple lines of your post. Generally, this ends in an ellipsis. Often, it doesn’t include any of the keywords you’re trying to rank for. It just looks sloppy. Take the extra few minutes to write a clear, relevant and helpful meta description, and you’ll get more clicks to your content.

Link internally

Building links is important for improving SEO, but you don’t have to sit around waiting for another site to find your blog and link to it. You can help search engines find and index your content by linking within your own site. We’ve done it twice in this post.

Consistent internal linking has the added benefit of spreading “link juice” throughout your site. According to WooRank, “The link juice obtained and distributed within your site keeps your inner pages popular on the web as well as your home page.” The more you link, the more visible your site becomes, so just keep linking back to yourself talking about linking back to yourself and remember, being meta is cool.

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Each post you publish has the potential to boost your search engine rankings and get more eyeballs on your content. These strategies should get you off to a good start, but if you want to take things to the next level, we highly recommend checking out Yoast’s Guide to WordPress SEO and Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO. You’ll be a “guru” in no time.

What do you do to improve your site’s SEO? Hit us up in the comments!

The post Blogging basics: WordPress SEO for complete beginners appeared first on Themezilla.

Every minute of every day, people share a whopping 1.3 million pieces of content on Facebook. So why is it that no matter how much content you create, or how exceptional it is, the only person who ever seems to pick it up and share it is your mother?

The people and brands that excel at social media don’t just produce consistently great content, they also know how to optimize it, promote it, and get it in front of the right audience. We don’t have a magic formula for making your content “go viral,” but we do have a few tips for making those links a little more enticing—and today we’re going to share them with you.

Make sharing easy

In an age when there are literally thousands of social media plugins available, there’s no reason to make readers work to share your content. One of the simplest and most popular ways of making posts easy to share is adding social sharing buttons to your site. You can choose to display only a few select social networks or a whole slew of them. If you write in 140-character soundbites, you can even take Neil Patel’s advice and add tweetable quotes throughout your posts.

Master the art of headline writing

We published an entire post about crafting engaging, clickable headlines a few months back because it’s just that important. Get the title wrong and you can kiss those clicks, shares and upvotes goodbye. But get it right—by building intrigue and focusing on the benefit—and you can render even the dullest content shareable (after all, 80 percent of people read only the headline, but that doesn’t stop them from sharing it with their friends). If you think you’ve got a winning headline, try running it through CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer, which will analyze its word balance, length, sentiment, and more. We scored an 81 with this post’s title!

Be positive

Nobody likes a Debbie Downer in their news feed. That’s what researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found when they tracked the sharing of more than 7,500 New York Times articles. People preferred to share articles with positive themes, and more than anything they wanted to share articles that “inspired awe.” We don’t recommend trying to put a positive spin on decidedly bad news stories, but we do recommend creating content that triggers strong positive emotions. Put a little sunshine in your readers’ days.

Be helpful

The same UPenn study also found that people were more likely to share content that was practical and actionable. The reason “How-to” articles often top “Most shared” lists is because people want to be recognized as helpful and knowledgeable. As the Times notes, “Sharing recipes or financial tips or medical advice makes sense according to classic economic theory: I give you something of practical value in the hope that you’ll someday return the favour.” Figure out what the most commonly asked questions are among your audience and create valuable content that answers or at least addresses those issues.

Model good behaviour

Remember the Golden Rule from grade school? Well, it still hasn’t gone out of style—especially on social media. If you want people to share your content, the best way to do it is to engage in the act of sharing yourself. Get to know some of the other people in your niche, comment on their posts, and share their content. Once you’ve established yourself as an active member of an online community, you’ll begin to attract attention to your own content, and if you’ve played nice, you’ll no doubt get some comments and shares from other authors. Just remember to stay humble and appreciative when that happens and don’t let success go to your head!

The post How to get more people to share your content appeared first on Themezilla.

It wasn’t that long ago that everyone loved email. It helped us stay in touch with loved ones and collaborate with colleagues. It even laid the foundation for one of the finest films of the 1990s (you know which one we’re talking about).

But after a couple decades of Lucky Winner scams, Nigerian prince proposals, and way too many ads for male enlargement pills, we finally had enough. AOL’s iconic “You’ve Got Mail” became “You’ve Got Spam,” and opening our inboxes was more often met with trepidation than excitement. As Fast Company put it, email became the most reviled communication experience ever.

Fast forward to 2016, and the pendulum has swung back. With the development of robust spam filters, smart categorization tools, and inbox zero principles, email has returned as strong as ever—much to the good fortune of bloggers, entrepreneurs, and anyone who appreciates a well-crafted piece of correspondence.

With that, here are our five great reasons why your site needs an email newsletter—stat.

Email is everywhere, all the time

Yes, the uptake of social media networks like Facebook and Twitter is crazy, but the uptake of email is even crazier. According to a report by the Radicati Group, by 2019, 2.9 billion people (over one-third of the world’s population) will be using email.

People access their email from work, home, desktops, laptops, and increasingly from mobile devices. And unlike social media feeds, people actually read their emails instead of skimming activity from the past hour or so and ignoring the rest. Even if someone goes on holiday and doesn’t check their messages for a week (keep in mind that the average email user checks in 15 times a day), your email will be waiting upon their return.

It strengthens relationships with your readers and customers

Say what you will about the antisocial nature of the web, keeping users engaged with your website, blog or online store is personal. By emailing regularly, you can both keep your readers and customers informed, as well as take your relationships to a level that would never have been possible with 140-character tweets.

It boosts traffic to your site

No matter what kind of site you’re running, there’s a good chance one of your primary goals is attracting more eyes. Building an audience or customer base is an art form that varies depending on your target demographic, but frequent, relevant emailing has consistently been shown to result in a significant uptick in site traffic. Make sure you have a newsletter opt-in link or pop-up on your site, so you can capture the email addresses of new visitors.

It gives you access to rich, actionable data

As American businessman and pioneer marketer John Wanamaker famously remarked, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” If only he’d lived to see the tricked-out dashboards of MailChimp and Constant Contact.

These services and others take the guesswork out of marketing analysis, shining light on important information like who’s opening your emails and what content they’re interested in. You can track things like opens, clicks, subscribe and unsubscribe rates, social media shares, and more. Every dollar, every subscriber, and every email is accounted for.

It’s cheap

Of all of the ways you can market your site, email is one of the most cost-effective. According to a 2015 study by the UK-based Direct Marketing Association, email has one of the highest returns on investment: £38 for every £1 spent (for comparison, banner ads had a return of about £3.50 for every £1 spent).

For small businesses and bloggers on a budget, email is a great way to reach a large number of subscribers for pennies per message. MailChimp even offers its services free for up to 2,000 subscribers with its Free Forever Plan. You won’t find a better deal than that.

An oldie and a goodie

Email may be nearly 45 years old—ancient by tech standards—but it remains an easy, inexpensive, and above-all effective marketing tactic. Whether you’ve published a new blog post, launched a new product, or just want to share your thoughts with the world, email is a great way to keep your audience informed and drive traffic back to your site.

Ready to get started? Check out our tips for crafting a top-notch email newsletter, start to finish!

The post 5 reasons your site needs an email newsletter appeared first on Themezilla.

When most people hear the word “ecommerce,” they think of Jeff Bezos or Jack Ma or some nameless, faceless tycoon in a suit. They don’t think of their neighbour who plays in a band, or their cousin who illustrates children’s books, and they almost certainly don’t think of themselves. “I’m just a blogger/sculptor/hobbyist chef,” they think. “I don’t have anything to sell.”

We beg to differ. The glory (and peril) of the internet is that it’s turned everyone into creators and publishers and entrepreneurs. These days, with the help of super simple and cool ecommerce solutions like Zillacommerce, there are all kinds of ways people can—and should—be making money online.

It might be an offshoot of your existing business that you’ve been considering awhile, or it might be a passion you only just realized could become profitable side gig. Chances are it won’t make you as rich or famous as “The Bez,” but hey, it’s worth a shot, right?

Today, we’re sharing some ecommerce ideas and selling strategies for people with “nothing to sell.” Whether you’re a niche blogger, freelance developer, hobby photographer, or just someone with an idea, there’s an opportunity in ecommerce for you. All you have to do is go out there and seize it.

Ecommerce for bloggers

If you’ve been running a blog, you already have an advantage when it comes to ecommerce—an audience of people who are avid consumers of your content. But loyal readers and paying customers are two different things. How do you encourage fans of your free content to take the next step?

One way is to enhance, repackage, and sell your blog content in the form of an ebook or video series. Lots of bloggers are keying into this strategy, including travel writer Kristen Luna of Camels and Chocolate, who started publishing eBooks to address some of her readers’ frequently asked questions. By supplementing and repackaging content, she’s allowing readers to rediscover older-but-still-valuable posts, while also adding a new income stream to her blog.

If eBooks aren’t your jam, there are plenty of other ways to break into ecommerce as a blogger. Casey and Matthew Hickey, the husband-and-wife team behind Turntable Kitchen, launched a subscription service that delivers monthly pairings of their two favourite things—food and music. Lizzie Garrett Mettler, the voice and curator of fashion blog Tomboy Style, recently revamped her site as a marketplace for the American-made products she was previously only writing about.

Ecommerce for creators

Do you dabble in jewelry-making? Tinker with circuit boards? Concoct natural beauty products from stuff you grow in your backyard? Congratulations, you’re a creator! (And if Paul Saffo is to be believed, there’s never been a better time for that.)

We’ve all heard the stories of the mother of three making a million dollars a year selling leg warmers and headbands on Etsy, and the 19-year-old who paid her way through college with statement necklaces and hoop earrings. But the creator economy isn’t just about crafts. Designers can design and sell new fonts and icons. Programmers can build themes, plugins and apps. Game developers can create the next Neko Atsume.

If you happen to have an online portfolio of your work, you’re already within striking distance of ecommerce success. Visual artist Jason Ratliff’s portfolio triples as a showcase, blog and online store where you can pick up some pretty sweet superhero prints. Singer-songwriter Holly Maher’s website includes streaming audio and video, as well as digital album downloads and physical merchandise for purchase.

Ecommerce for non-profits

Ecommerce and non-profits may not seem like the most natural pairing, but there are all kinds of ways for non-profit organizations of all shapes and sizes to benefit from selling online. After all, non-profits still need to make money, and ecommerce solutions are a great way to facilitate things like recurring donations and memberships.

And there’s a lot more you can do with ecommerce than accept donations 24/7 with no staffing and low-to-no transaction fees (though that in itself is pretty huge). Organizations like Amnesty International and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society have both capitalized on ecommerce to sell branded merchandise to raise funds for their causes. Animal sanctuary Three Ring Ranch has used it to facilitate its animal adoption and “godparent” program (just note that no matter how much you might want a pet bison, they do specify, “You are not actually taking the animal home with you!”).

Ecommerce for the rest of us

If you haven’t seen yourself in one of the categories presented here, don’t despair: there’s an ecommerce opportunity out there for you. With the popularity of ecommerce exploding and the technology becoming more accessible every day, there are so many ways to make a living selling online. If you take some time to think about what you’re good at and what inspires you, you’re bound to come up with an idea that can put some extra cash in your pocket.

The post Ecommerce ideas for people with “nothing to sell” appeared first on Themezilla.

If you’ve been running a WordPress blog for any length of time, chances are you’ve come across the term “plugin” at some point. But what are plugins, exactly? Well, besides a scented oil product you can use to make your home smell like Pure Vanilla Joy, plugins are little bits of software that can be added to your site to make it do things.

What kinds of things? All kinds of things! Whether you want to make your blog easier for search engines to find, your content more shareable, or your commenting more streamlined, with 43,269 WordPress plugins listed in the official directory alone, there’s probably a plugin—or a hundred—designed for that specific purpose.

While it’s great to have so many cheats and fixes at your fingertips, sorting the wheat from the chaff can be tough, especially when you’re just starting out. That’s why today we’re sharing our list of the six plugins we think every WordPress blogger should know about. Here are our must-haves and our MVPs, the best plugins for your blog—you’ll wonder how you lived without them.

Backup Buddy

As a blogger, you’re probably familiar with the pain of having a program crash, freeze, or unexpectedly log out before you’ve saved your post. Now amplify that feeling by 1,000 and you’ll have an idea of what it feels like to have your site hacked and not have a backup of your database. Fortunately, there are plenty of backup plugins out there, probably the most beginner-friendly of which is BackupBuddy. It lets you schedule automatic backups, encrypt data, upload copies to preferred storage locations, and helps you sleep at night.

Disqus Comments

One of the most important and all-too-often neglected parts of blogs is the comment box. While WordPress’ default commenting system does the trick if you’re only getting a few comments per post, for in-depth discussions you’re better off with Disqus’s super powerful (and pretty) plugin. Besides providing users with a superior social interface, it makes managing and responding to comments way easier, and blocks spam like nobody’s business.

Floating Social Bar

These days, having social media on your blog is about as important as having post titles and a search bar. Unfortunately, most social plugins come with about three social networks you want and dozens more that you don’t, which can be a real drag on page load speed. What makes Floating Social Bar stand out is that it only supports a handful of major social networks—Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest—meaning you’ll get all the retweets and likes and upvotes you crave, without being weighed down by platforms nobody’s heard of.

Editorial Calendar

Do you have one of those laminated calendars over your desk that’s been written over so many times it’s streaky and grey? If so, it’s time to ditch the calendar and invest in some art. And a plugin. Editorial Calendar is great for staying organized and getting into a groove of regular posting. It grabs all of your scheduled posts and drafts, and places them on a tidy calendar to give you an overview of what’s coming up and what still needs to be done. It’s an especially useful tool for managing multiple author blogs and keeping everyone up-to-date and in sync.

Gravity Forms

Your readers need to be able to contact you, whether it’s to ask a question or find out about advertising on your site. With Gravity Forms’ simple drag-and-drop interface, you can build not just a stunning contact form, but all kinds of surveys, quizzes, newsletter signups, donation forms, and more. As testimonial writer Tom Westervelt put it, “This is the mack daddy of form plugins!” Nailed it.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

Before this post goes to print, we’ll be running it through Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin to make sure everything from the frequency of our keywords to the length of our title get the green light. It only takes about 90 seconds, and the benefits to site traffic and usability are huge. If you’re worried that you won’t know how to use it because terms like “canonical” and “breadcrumbs” and even “SEO” mean nothing to you, don’t worry—the plugin walks you through each step. Before you know it you’ll be optimizing like a pro.

The post Blogging basics: Best plugins for your blog appeared first on Themezilla.

People hate advertising. They hate how it interrupts their TV shows, Youtube videos and podcasts. They hate how it forces them to click away from something they have no interest in. And (for the most part) they hate being told to buy stuff they don’t need for problems they don’t have.

But what if it’s not advertising they hate so much as the format, quality and timing of it?

Consider for a moment the millions of people who watch the Super Bowl specifically for the commercials. Or the moviegoers who show up half an hour early because they just love the trailers. Or the folks who linger outside their local realtor’s office on Saturdays to read the latest listings.

Are they gluttons for punishment? Or could it be that they actually find certain types of advertising informative, engaging, and—dare we say it—enjoyable?

We think it’s the latter. And since selling ad space is one of the most common ways of monetizing WordPress sites, today we’re bringing you our top tips for better WordPress advertising. Follow these suggestions, and not only will you bring in a bit of extra income, you’ll also build trust, community and loyalty with your readers.

Exercise restraint when adding ads to your site

Just because you’ve decided to put ads on your site doesn’t mean you need to put them everywhere. If you bombard visitors with ads—pop-ups, banner ads, autoplay videos—they will leave. Be discreet. Limit the number of ads you use, and try to make the ads you do display as unobtrusive as possible. Remember that people came to your site because they saw something they wanted. Do you really want to throw something up that’s going to distract them from it?

Choose advertising that’s relevant to your niche

This one might sound like a no-brainer, but it’s surprising how often site owners miss the mark. Online advertising should complement the content it adjoins. If you run a blog about sustainable living, selling ad space to a power tools manufacturer is probably not the best choice. Better to go with the reusable food wrap or organic cosmetics company—something that’s going to be at home with your content and of interest to your users.

Be honest about what’s advertising and what isn’t

To drive traffic to pay-per-click ads, some site owners attempt to disguise paid advertising as original content. Sometimes this takes the form of “related content” recommendations at the bottom of a post. Other times, it’s a paid product endorsement without an acknowledgment of the fact. Don’t deceive your users. It’s against Google policy, and it’s no way to win followers.

Use recognizable brands to build trust

This might seem surprising, but the mere presence of ads can actually lend credibility to your site. Visitors will assume that if companies are keen to advertise with you, it must mean you have access something that is in demand. What’s more, it sends a message that your advertisers essentially endorse your content. Having a recognizable brand advertise with you isn’t so different from having them sponsor or partner with you: it tells readers that you’re a trusted source.

***

Maybe the best way to get advertising right is to look at all the ways other sites get it wrong. Find you’re being flooded with products and services that don’t interest you? Turn it around and make connecting with relevant advertisers a priority. Frustrated by companies masquerading advertising as legitimate content? Take the high road and be transparent about what you’re being paid to write.

You might not be able to create an advertising experience that people actively seek out like Super Bowl ads—kudos if you can!—but by following these guidelines you should be able to keep users happy and coming back to your site for more.

The post Better advertising for your WordPress site appeared first on Themezilla.

Whether you’re a professional photographer, amateur baker or aspiring florist, ecommerce is a great thing to get into—especially right now. Statistics continue to document the supersonic growth of ecommerce, and full-featured platforms like Shopify and Bigcommerce have eliminated many of the technical barriers to entry, opening the door to virtually anyone with a product to sell.

Attractive as these dedicated options may be, breaking into ecommerce on a new and unfamiliar platform can seem intimidating. While there’s something to be said for getting out of your comfort zone every now and then, if you’re already running a site on WordPress—dare we say the most powerful, flexible platform of all—why change? With Zillacommerce, you can start selling online without the hassle of switching platforms or giving up the familiarity, flexibility or awesomeness of WordPress.

With that, today we thought we’d introduce you to a few essentials that will help make your first foray into ecommerce a success. There’s a ton of information out there on everything from mobile selling to content marketing to SEO, but we’re going to start by drilling down to what’s really necessary for you to make your first sales. If you’re running on WordPress, all you need is a Zillacommerce theme—it’s not too late to snag this stunner for free—a $9/month Shopify Lite account, and something to sell.

Ready? Let’s get started.

Figure out what you’re going to sell

This might sound obvious, but one of the first and biggest challenges aspiring sellers face is deciding what product to offer. Our best advice? Start small. A store that sells just one product is still a store, and if you’re going to be handling the production, fulfillment and support yourself, you’d be wise to keep your product line simple. You can always expand once you’ve got some sales and experience under your belt.

Pick something you’re passionate about, but also be pragmatic about what people are going to buy. Do some market research. Think about your ability to consistently produce quality product at scale. Spend some time thinking about who your target customer is and how you might position your product toward them.

Take some photos—good ones

If you’ve been running a blog, portfolio or website for any length of time, then you should already understand the importance of good imagery. It’s even more crucial in ecommerce, where customers base their purchasing decisions primarily and sometimes exclusively on how a product looks.

When it comes to product photography, low-resolution, poorly-lit images aren’t going to cut it. Though you still can’t allow customers to touch and scrutinize products online, you can approximate the experience of real-world shopping by including a variety of shots that show your product in all its glorious detail. Consider hiring a professional photographer for a few hours, or brush up on your DIY photography skills before shooting them yourself.

Write some compelling product descriptions

Good product photography will go a long way towards netting your first sales, but there’s no substitute for original, engaging product descriptions. Your descriptions should sell the benefits of your product while accurately detailing its features. Remember that people only read about 20 percent of the words on a webpage, so it’s important to be concise while at the same time telling a “story” about your product. Here are some tips for crafting compelling copy for absolutely anything—even tube socks.

Nail down a fulfillment strategy

You are not Amazon. You do not have 250 fulfillment centres and a quarter million workers to help you get your product to your customer. Chances are, what you have is a corner of your studio with some boxes and old newspapers piled high. And that’s okay! But if you’re serious about becoming an ecommerce entrepreneur, you’d do well to devote a bit of time to considering your fulfilment strategy.

With Zillacommerce and Shopify’s online order management system, you’ll be notified via email when someone makes a purchase, and your Shopify admin will update to show your number of pending orders. You take it from there. How are you going to package your product? What shipping options will you offer? Do you really have the time and desire to handle everything on your own, or do you want to bring on some extra help?

Get ready to floor customers with top-notch support

You may not be bagging groceries or working at a department store, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore the importance of good customer service. From responding to initial pre-sale questions to filling orders to dealing with complaints, your number-one priority should be making your customer feel satisfied. That doesn’t mean you have to be available 24/7 and solve every every conceivable problem instantly, but by being responsive and genuine in your communications, you’ll be well on your way to building customer loyalty and finding success in today’s competitive ecommerce market.

The post A beginner’s guide to ecommerce, WordPress-style appeared first on Themezilla.

WordPress can do just about anything. Want to build a landing page? It’s got you covered. Scheduling system? No sweat. How about a full-blown ecommerce store?

… Sure?

Until now, if you’ve wanted to add ecommerce to your WordPress site, you had to use a plugin. Of course, plugins can be great for simple things like SEO and post scheduling, but when it comes to more complex functionality, they can be a huge pain. From clashing designs to constant updates to security vulnerabilities, there’s no plugin that provides an ideal ecommerce experience.

That’s why we’re so excited to unveil Zillacommerce, the world’s first integrated solution for selling online with WordPress and Shopify. Now, WordPress users can use Shopify’s beginner-friendly, state-of-the-art ecommerce functionality without giving up everything they know and love about WordPress. No plugins, no hassle, just super-awesome ecommerce functionality, baked right into your theme.

To show you what Zillacommerce can do, we’re giving away Themezilla’s first ecommerce-enabled theme, Hype, free for the next 30 days. With its handsome hero area, grid-style homepage layout, and tons of customization options, Hype has everything you need to showcase—and sell—your work.

We want your feedback, so let us know what you think of Hype, as well as how you’d like to see ecommerce integrated into our existing and future themes!

The post Introducing Hype—now with Zillacommerce appeared first on Themezilla.

In 2016, there are more mobile devices than there are people in the world, mobile searches exceed desktop searches, and the average person looks at their phone 46 times per day.

With stats like that, it’s clear the debate over responsive design is over. We called it months ago when Google updated its search algorithm to reward mobile-friendly sites. But simply squeezing your site into a version that fits on a smaller screen doesn’t cut it anymore. As Brad Frost eloquently put it, “Your visitors don’t give a shit if your site is responsive.” They just want something fast and easy to use.

With that in mind, today we’re sharing some tips for enhancing your site’s mobile user experience. If you want to keep your mobile users coming back for more, you need to adapt to the unique ways they access and interact with your content—and that goes way beyond whether or not your theme renders properly on an iPhone.

1. Simplify your navigation.

If there’s one thing you should keep in mind when evaluating your site for mobile friendliness, it’s this: mobile screens are small. A comprehensive menu might look fine on your desktop, but try to cram it onto a mobile screen and you’re going to make a mess. Think about how to shrink menus down to the fewest possible options and you’ll make it much easier for mobile visitors to navigate your site.

2. Simplify and minimize forms.

People hate filling out forms even at the best of times, but take away their keyboard, hand them a tiny touchscreen, and watch them get even more riled up. When creating forms for mobile, include only fields that are absolutely necessary. Make the fields—and the Submit button—big, clickable, and with plenty of space around them. Where possible, keep forms to a single page; where not possible, use a progress bar to show users how many pages they have to click through.

3. Make your calls to action stand out.

This might seem obvious, but so many site admins still expect their mobile users to click a CTA the size of a dust mite to read their content, join their mailing list, or buy their product. Be bold! Econsultancy recommends orange as the ideal colour for drawing attention to a button, and Apple suggests a minimum target size of 44px square. Whatever you can do to make your CTAs more noticeable—short of carnivalesque animations and weird sound effects—do it.

4. Dial down your colour palette.

“Rainbow” might be your three-year-old niece’s favourite colour, but she’s not your web designer now, is she? Your website doesn’t have to be monochrome, but a tasteful white background, plain black text, and one or two supporting colours make for a much more focused and pleasant user experience than, say, this. Yikes!

5. Keep fonts large and legible.

Remember when we said the most important consideration for mobile site design is screen size? Well, in the context of fonts and legibility, screen size is very important. For one, you don’t want your titles to fill the entire screen, or worse, for users to have to scroll down to learn what your article is about. For another, you don’t want the body text to be so small that users have to pinch and zoom to see it. We endorse Typecast’s awesome proportional method: for mobile, headlines should be 2x the body font size; subheads 1.625x (and nothing should be smaller than 14pts).

Of course, the fonts you use have a big impact on legibility too. Our rule of thumb is if you wouldn’t use it on your resume, then you shouldn’t use it on your site. Helvetica? Good. Benton Sans (the font you’re reading right now)? Good. Comic Sans? Bad. Very, very bad.

6. Be brief.

Sometimes, it’s easier to write 1,000 words than it is to write 10. We know. But we also know that nobody’s going to read your rambling manifesto on their phone. Not all of your phrases need to be 140-character sound bites, but try to include a few. Focus your attention on things like titles, slogans, and short, descriptive phrases that get your message across, and try to eliminate those pesky weasel words and redundancies that so often creep into our writing.

7. Let your images do the talking.

When you have a lot to say and not much space to say it, an image is a great choice. The right visual can do wonders for your content, evoking an emotional response that might not have been possible with plain text. Choose images that illustrate and explain, and, if you can, try to use images that complement your site design.

8. Optimize for speed.

Compelling visuals? Good. Giant RAW photos that take forever to load? Bad. Respect your users’ data plans by running your images through a tool like TinyJPG or JPEGmini before adding them to your site. Cache plugins like W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache are another great way to speed up your site and stay in your users’ good books. They create static copies of your pages and temporarily store them until they’re needed, meaning that if someone’s already visited your site, their browser will require much less “fresh” information to load the page on subsequent visits.

9. Test, test, and test again.

There are dozens of screen sizes out there, and it’s important that your site scales to all of them. Sound daunting? It is if you’re trying to do it all yourself. But what are friends for if not testing the heck out of your mobile user experience? Email everyone you know with an iPhone, Android, Blackberry, tablet and whatever other newfangled contraptions the kids have these days, and ask them to point out your flaws. It might sting a little, but it’s worth it—promise.

The post 9 tips for improving your site’s mobile UX appeared first on Themezilla.

We’re nearly three weeks into 2016, and you’ve probably cheated on your diet at least once. A few drinks may have been drunk since New Year’s Day. Your commitment to better budgeting and early morning workouts might also be wearing thin.

Don’t despair. By this point in the year, more than half of resolution-makers have given up, perhaps because January 1st is the worst possible day to make resolutions. If you’re determined to beat the odds and make lasting positive changes, why not start February 1st — or January 19th, for that matter?

Today, we’re giving you another crack at making some New Year’s Resolutions, at least where your WordPress site is concerned. Whether it’s been collecting cobwebs for months or only needs a tweak here and there, we’ve got five rock-solid resolutions that will keep your site current, secure, and running like a well-oiled machine in 2016.

1. Keep your files up to date

How often do you hit “Install” the first time you see “Updates are ready for your computer” pop up on your screen? Our guess is not very much. Most people put off updating their software about as much as they procrastinate upgrading their WordPress code, theme and plugin files. Everything’s working fine, right? You’ll get around to it eventually, right?

Wrong. Keeping your files up to date is one of the most important and effective measures you can take against getting hacked. When you let your core files fall out of date, you’re handing hackers an open invitation to exploit obsolete security features and gain access to the back end of your site.

We know it can seem like there’s a new update every time you log in to your site — in reality, there were only 16 in 2015 — but the two minutes it takes to install an update is nothing compared to the time and stress it takes to recover from a security breach.

2. Clean up your database

Speaking of things people put off until disaster strikes — left unattended, databases can grow into huge, unruly messes that slow down and even break your site. You might feel like you run a clean operation, but extra data from site revisions, drafted posts, spam comments, and pingbacks all pile up over time, bloating your site and making it run as slow as molasses.

Before you wade too deep into the muck of your backend, it’s important to back up both your database and site files. Keeping an extra copy can help restore things in a flash if you get overzealous and accidentally delete something crucial. Plugins like VaultPress, BackupBuddy and Updraft Plus all make quick work of backups.

Now it’s time to start cleaning. Start by deleting any plugins you aren’t using. It’s also a good idea to purge any lingering plugin data in your wp_postmeta table. Then, turn your attention to comments, clearing out those awaiting moderation, deleting spam, pingbacks and trackbacks. If you want a plugin that does all these tasks and more, we recommend WPOptimize.

3. Stay on top of your on-page SEO

There are many factors that influence search engine rankings — just look at this visual guide from Moz — but you don’t have to painstakingly tick off each one to achieve strong SEO. Taking five minutes at the end of each post or page to run through a few items can do wonders for your ranking.

What should you pay attention to? First off, if at all possible, try to use a relevant keyword in both your post title and URL. You’ll also gain favour with Google bots if you can use this keyword at least once in the first few lines. Make sure to add a meta description to each page and post, again including your keyword if it doesn’t sound too contrived. Insert some relevant outbound links, optimize your images, ensure your HTML tags are appropriate, and you’re done!

4. Proofread before you publish

Everywhere you look online, from blog posts to news stories to banner ads, you’ll find typos, grammar mistakes and missing words. Why? Because proofreading takes more time and patience than most of us are willing to commit. But when it can be the determining factor between getting a contract and losing one, or between running a successful ad campaign and ending up the butt of a joke, proofreading is worth the investment.

Make it standard practice to run everything you write through a spell-checker (WordPress doesn’t have one baked in like most word processing programs, but this post shows you how to add one). Try reading your writing aloud to catch any missing punctuation or clunky phrases. And of course, a second pair of eyes can almost always catch something your eyes didn’t, so ask a friend or colleague to read what you’ve written before you hit Publish.

5. Improve your site’s mobile experience

Just about everyone these days is toting some kind of mobile device. They’re using them to do their shopping, check bank balances, and, yes, read blogs and websites. If you’ve been ignoring this growing segment of site traffic, now is the time to make catering to it a priority.

How do you optimize your site for smaller screens? It all starts with a responsive WordPress theme. There are plenty of mobile-friendly themes out there, and we just happen to make some of the best.

If you’re too attached to your current design to scrap it for a new theme, you can also grab a mobile-friendly plugin like WP Mobile Detect. It will help make your site content beautiful and readable on just about any device without forcing you to give up the design you’ve spent countless hours perfecting.

Making your site responsive will go a long way towards improving your site’s mobile experience, but also be mindful of how mobile visitors access your content. Think about the size of their screens — wordy headlines and large, elaborate graphics aren’t going to work. Neither is pagination. Keep your titles punchy, your images optimized, and your infinite scroll switched on, and you’ll keep visitors tapping and swiping into 2016 and beyond.

The post 5 New Year’s resolutions for your WordPress site appeared first on Themezilla.

By the time we hit “Publish” on this post, some 2 million blog posts will already have been written today. Since you started reading this article, more than 50 posts have gone up on WordPress alone. For a new blogger trying to get his or her blog noticed, these numbers can seem daunting.

So how do you cut through the noise and get people to read what you write? Among many factors, one of the most neglected also happens to be one of the most important — blog post titles.

According to Copyblogger, for every 10 people who come across your article, eight will read the headline, while only two will read beyond it. Your title is your first — and many times only — opportunity to hook a prospective reader. As Copyblogger writes: “Without a compelling promise that turns a browser into a reader, the rest of your words may as well not exist.”

Today we’re sharing five actionable tips for writing better blog post titles. By crafting an engaging and clickable headline, you’ll increase your conversions, social shares, and most importantly, the number of people actually reading your blog.

1. Make it intriguing.

Would you be excited to read a 1,000-page book titled Tote the Weary Load? No? Then it’s probably a good thing Margaret Mitchell decided to switch the title of her magnum opus to Gone With The Wind. People aren’t interested in reading boring, dry drivel — they’re interested in snappy, engaging content. It’s up to your blog post title to convince them that that’s what you’re offering.

2. Set the right expectations.

While there’s something to be said for arousing curiosity, your title shouldn’t leave readers in the dark about your post’s topic. You need to align your headline’s promise with what you deliver in the rest of your article. As Moz points out, the worst mistake you can make is misrepresenting the content of your post: “Don’t advertise the best burger in town and then have it be a veggie burger.” Amen.

3. Focus on the benefit.

Put yourself in your readers’ shoes. Why should they read your article? What problem will it solve? How-to titles are effective because they let readers know your post provides valuable information about a topic of interest. But starting all your titles with “How to…” gets real old real fast, so find creative ways of packaging your benefit. “Three Great Methods For Peeling a Banana,” “A Beginner’s Guide to Macrame,” and “Everything You Need to Know to Win at Capture the Flag” are all posts we would read.

4. Keep it short and to the point.

There’s no steadfast rule for title length on the web. Still, shorter is better if you want to rank well with search engines and gain traction on social networks. Google’s display limit is 65 characters, and a title of that length also fits nicely into a tweet. QuickSprout says the perfect length for a headline is six words, but we say if you need to go longer to achieve the perfect balance between hooking a reader and setting their expectations, go for it!

5. Try to optimize for SEO.

While post titles should be written primarily with human users in mind, it’s also important to make them attractive to Google bots. Happily, prospective readers and bots are often looking for the same thing: keywords relevant to their search. Google Adwords’ Keyword Planner is great for researching the terms that will get you the most mileage. If you can add a relevant keyword or two to your title without sounding verbose or awkward, you’ll be rewarded with more clicks, more shares, and better position on the results page.

Hopefully this post has given you a few ideas on how to concoct creative and effective titles for your blog posts. Have something to add? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

The post Blogging basics: 5 tips for writing better post titles appeared first on Themezilla.

Stock images are everywhere online. There’s the creative professional staring at a blank computer screen, the jaunty telemarketer flashing her brightest, whitest smile, and, who could forget, the women laughing alone with salad?

It’s no secret that a lot of stock photos look incredibly generic and fake, but there are times when they might be your only option for adding visual interest to your site. The good news is that beautiful, uncontrived stock images do exist, and by the time you get to the end of this post, you’ll know how and where to find them.

We’ll get to a roundup of our favourite stock photography sites in a minute, but before you add any stock images to your site, you should ask yourself these four questions:

1. Do I have the rights to these images?
No one wants to upload an image only to be slapped with a hefty fee and threatening letter from a stock agency a few weeks later. To avoid this scenario, take some time to familiarize yourself with the different types of images and license types. Word to the wise: royalty-free does not, in fact, mean the image can be used for free.

2. Are these images relevant?
Studies show that while users pay close attention to photos and other images that are relevant to the information they accompany, decorative “fluff” is largely ignored online. No matter how stunning a photo may be, if it doesn’t enhance the content around it, it will undoubtedly detract from it.

3. Have my readers seen these images before?
One of the biggest disadvantages of using stock photos is that you have no control over them, meaning the photo you choose to accompany a blog post about growing your small business could also appear on the side of a bus or in the collateral of your closest competitor. If a face looks familiar, or if you’ve seen the image used elsewhere, pick a different photo.

4. Do I have my own images?
In 2015, when just about everyone has a great camera built into their phone, there’s no reason to rely solely on stock photos for your site. If you have an original image, use it.

Where to find high-quality, eye-catching stock images

The internet has no shortage of stock photography sites, and everyone has their favourite. Here’s a small selection of resources we know and love here at Themezilla. If you think we’ve missed any gems, let us know in the comments!

Stocksy
With thousands of awesome images and top-notch search capabilities, Stocksy delivers pixel-perfect, distinctive images every time. Throw in the fact that it’s a small business that supports local photographers, and you can see why it’s number-one on our list.

Life of Pix
Created by the fabulous folks at LEEROY Creative in Montreal, Life of Pix is home to some of the web’s most stunning stock imagery. Want to get fancy and add some video to your site? Check out Life of Vid, which serves up fresh video content sans-copyright restrictions several times a month.

Death to Stock
Founded by “rogue photographers” Allie and David, Death to Stock sets a new standard for stock photography. Subscribe via email and you’ll receive 10 free stock images of the category of your choosing every month. DTSP also offers a premium membership with unlimited access to more than 400 images, plus an exclusive members-only pack, for just $15/month.

Unsplash
Looking for breathtakingly beautiful landscape images? Unsplash is your answer. With hundreds of “free (do whatever you want) high resolution photos,” you’re bound to find something you love, whether it’s an insanely detailed macro image of a succulent or a kilometre-spanning aerial photograph.

New Old Stock
We’re suckers for heirloom black-and-white photography, and New Old Stock is all about “Recapturing history.” It features an extensive collection of of antique photos, many from government archives or recovered from estate sales. It’s also a great procrastination tool.

Final thoughts

Stock images are a great resource for adding visuals to your site, but don’t overdo it. Choose carefully and remember that even the best images become meaningless if they don’t work within the context of your site’s content and design. Use sparingly, choose wisely, and you should be well on your way to stock image success.

The post Tips for keeping it real with stock photography appeared first on Themezilla.

Building an audience is tough. While blogging might seem fun and easy at first — setting up your site, banging out a few introductory posts — it only takes a few months of posting great content into the abyss to understand why blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants.

So how do you build a robust and engaged community that reads, shares, and comments on your content? The best answer might be a simple one — “The same way you build an offline one, slowly and honestly” — but there are steps you can take to fast-track your success.

One of those steps is syndicating your content on other websites. Today we’ll explain what syndication means, what some of its benefits and drawbacks are, and how to get started.

What is content syndication?

Put simply, content syndication is the process of republishing already-posted content on a third-party site. Usually the content appears as it did originally, with a comment from the new publisher explaining that it’s a syndicated post, and sometimes a statement of its relevance to their readers.

Marketer and blogger Danny Brown has this great analogy:

“For most local journalists, your stories are mainly read by the local township. There’s nothing wrong with this, and it’s a solid enough career. However, now and again you might write a human interest story that gets picked up by the nationals, and your piece is quoted in the New York Times or CNN. That kind of exposure can lead to bigger gigs and paychecks, as you’re approached to provide stories (or images) for these bigger outlets, as well as your local publication where it all started.”

Content syndication works the same way — your blog is always the first place your content appears, but it gets picked up by (or more likely, pitched to) a variety of other “newsrooms” that are in your niche but have larger readerships than your little “local rag.”

The benefits

Many bloggers aren’t in it for fame or fortune, but most at least want a larger following — or, as Jeff Goins put it, “a tribe of inspired individuals who will read what we say, believe what we believe, and share our ideas with the world.”

Content syndication helps you do just that. It gets your content in front of an audience you wouldn’t otherwise have reached on your own. It increases the exposure of your ideas, drives more traffic to your blog, gets more pingbacks, and improves search rankings.

Plus, it doesn’t take anywhere near the effort of brainstorming, researching, and writing new posts. If you’ve already written and published content once, why not reach more people with the same content? It’s basic ROI.

The drawbacks

Some people argue that the benefits of content syndication are overstated, primarily because it ticks off Google by creating duplicate content. While that may have been a valid concern years ago, Google bots are now sophisticated enough to select the most relevant version of your content, which, if republishing sites are linking back to your blog properly, shouldn’t be an issue.

To be extra safe and ensure that you’re not unwittingly destroying your search ranking, you can add a rel=canonical tag to the syndicated version of your content to point search engines to the original source. Another option is the “noindex” meta tag, which will prevent Google from indexing the syndicated copy while still spreading valuable “link juice” between articles.

Start syndicating

There are a lot of of places you can syndicate your content. Chances are, you already know some sites that would be a good fit for your content. If not, paid syndication networks like Outbrain, Zemanta, SimpleReach and others are a godsend for managing content across a huge network of syndicators, providing detailed and centralized analytics information you can use to create the type of content your audience wants.

Don’t forget that you can also syndicate your content through social media, guest blogs, bookmarking sites, and the old standby: RSS subscriptions. Different audiences flock to different platforms, so do your research and adapt your syndication strategy accordingly.

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There’s no magic-bullet fix for building your blog audience. Over the years, a lot of game-changing SEO tricks have come and gone, but syndicated content has stuck because it’s a reliable and powerful strategy for building a community around your blog.

Do you syndicate your blog content? What’s worked well for you? If you have any experience or tips to share, hit us up in the comments!

The post Blogging basics: Content syndication done right appeared first on Themezilla.

When your site starts to feel stale and outdated, it’s tempting to tear the whole thing down and start from scratch. But total overhauls can be costly, time-consuming, and unnecessary when you already have a good base to work from.

Before you set about reinventing the proverbial wheel, try tweaking what you’ve got. Your homepage is a good place to start. It’s your site’s virtual front door, and in most cases it sees the majority of your traffic. The small adjustments you make here can do as much (and sometimes more) for your site than any radical redesign ever could.

Without further ado, here are 10 simple design tweaks that can have a big impact on your site’s aesthetics — and analytics.

Get your best stuff above the fold

When you only have 50 milliseconds and 700 pixels to inform someone’s snap judgment about your site, you should lead with your ace. Do visitors have to scroll or search high and low to find basic information like who you are and what your site’s about? Not good. Make the “above the fold” section the best part of your site and give them a reason to scroll down and stick around.

Break up the text

Big blocks of text are a turn-off. Even if you have only 100 words of perfectly punctuated, beautifully wrought copy on your homepage, if it’s presented as a single chunk of unformatted text, you’re going to lose people to the back button.

Instead, split paragraphs into bite-sized segments that are easy to read and digest. Bullet points, numbered lists, and graphics are all great for breaking unwieldy sentences down to their most important parts. And remember, white space is well-used space, not wasted space.

Clean up your copy

When it comes to copy, “high-quality” copy isn’t just about proper spelling and grammar — it’s about building trust. If you’re asking people to provide personal information in an enquiry form, you’ll jeopardize their trust and your professionalism if the copy is riddled with careless typos and poor grammar. Be clear, concise and careful with your copy and people will be far more likely to linger long enough to hear what you have to say.

Add a quality visual

Visuals are key to creating a well-designed homepage, but not all visuals are made equal. As Jakob Nielsen’s eye-tracking studies showed, people pay a lot more attention to photos of real people doing real things than they do to the feel-good, decorative and jazzed-up images that are typical of stock photography. A photo is absolutely worth a thousand words — but if that photo isn’t the right photo, it’s going to say the wrong things.

Optimize typography

Most people underestimate the value of good typography on their site. If you’ve got the words down and they’re legible, you can cross it off your list, right? Wrong. According to Information Architects, “optimizing typography is optimizing readability, accessibility, usability and overall graphic balance.” Safe to say, there’s a little more to it than simple legibility.

Short of employing a professional typographer or graphic designer, you can optimize your site’s typography by taking a critical look at fonts, weights, colours and spacing. Note things like contrast, line-height and typeface pairing, then check out these great resources to improve the type on your site.

Give it a fresh coat of paint

Ask any psychologist and they’ll tell you that colours evoke similar responses in people. Yellow is for optimism, red is for excitement, green is for peace, balance and creativity. But it doesn’t always work that way — personal preference, cultural differences and context all muddy the effect colours have on us.

Still, making a change to the colour scheme of your site can have a big impact on how people perceive and interact with it. Take the oft-cited example of the green and red buttons. The red button outperformed the green button by 21 percent, meaning for that site with that audience red was the right choice. For your site, green or any of the other 16,777,216 colour variations might work better. Try out a few new shades and see how your audience responds.

Add a call-to-action button (or improve the one you already have)

A strong call-to-action tells people what to do next, whether that’s buying a product, signing up for a newsletter, or just learning more about you. If you don’t already have one, you needed one yesterday. If you do have one, it’s always good to review best practices and see how yours stacks up. Text matters, shape matters, and colour really matters, so run some A/B tests and see what works best for you.

Optimize images

The speed of your site is closely tied to its success. Visitors aren’t going to stick around and wait for your homepage to load when they can find the same information elsewhere in less time. How do you speed things up and maintain your competitive edge? Optimizing images can be time-consuming if your site has a large number of pages, but if you’ve got a clean homepage, it shouldn’t take long. Tools like smush.it and TinyJPG both make quick work of shrinking bulky, oversized images.

Go easy on the links

Links are good for SEO, but on your homepage, they can be distracting and send visitors packing when they only just arrived. Simplicity is key. You may also want to scrutinize your primary navigation links with your visitors in mind. Get rid of any unnecessary pages and make sure your links are clear and user-friendly.

Add social sharing buttons

Want to win friends and influence people? That’s a tall order for a single site admin, but not so unrealistic if you put your visitors to work for you. By allowing them to share your site to social media, you’ll be expanding your reach to new networks that you wouldn’t have been able to access on your own. There are all kinds of share buttons out there — including these beauties — so shop around and be sure to consider placement, customization and tracking as you make your decision.

The post 10 design tweaks you can make to your homepage right now appeared first on Themezilla.

As Forrest Gump’s momma always told him, WordPress sites are like a bowl of potato chips: you can never have just one. (That’s right, isn’t it?) Sometimes you end up with a manageable two or three. Other times it’s a real handful — 10, 20, 30, or even more.

Managing so many sites can be a time-consuming task — switching back and forth, keeping tabs on each, manually updating themes, plugins and content. Thankfully, there’s a better way.

Today we’re featuring five great plugins that make managing multiple WordPress sites a lot more, well, manageable. Of all the similar plugins and tools that have cropped up in recent years, these ones will help you manage multiple sites easily from a single centralized dashboard.

(One quick clarification before we jump in: the plugins in this post are aimed at managing multiple WordPress installations, not multiple sites that share a single WordPress installation. For the latter, check out WordPress Multisite, another great feature we’ll cover in a future post.)

WPRemote

Once a premium (paid) service, WPRemote now lets you monitor an unlimited number of sites for free. It doesn’t have the most features, but it has all the most important ones, and it does a bang-up job to boot. Its users can track and update the WordPress versions each of their sites are running, generate site backups, automatically update plugins and themes, search and add notes to sites. WPRemote also boasts one of the slickest interfaces out there, making it a dream to work with.

Infinite WP

Infinite WP’s defining feature is its self-hosted system, meaning the databases for multiple sites exist on a single home server. This involves a bit more work on the front end than some of the other available solutions (the control panel for each site must be downloaded and installed on your server). However, once it’s up and running, the interface is pretty easy to use, and for the price — the basic version is free — you can’t beat the value.

CMS Commander

CMS Commander is a powerhouse of a management plugin, offering loads of unique features not found elsewhere. These include: bulk editing, backlink monitoring, customized maintenance modes, and “automated content” from a number of different providers. CMS Commander also has the distinction of being the most multilingual service — in addition to English, it’s also available in German, Spanish and Russian!

iControl WP

Using their in-house WorpDrive software, the developers of iControlWP have created a solid multi-site back-up and management tool. Its features include comment moderation, bulk actions and controls, built-in support, and some truly great security options. Their pricing structure is also enticing — at just $0.95 per site per month, you get one of the most feature-rich programs at one of the most attractive price points.

ManageWP

Now nearly five years old, the oldest and most established plugin of the bunch is still the best. With a highly intuitive interface that makes quick work of site-spanning updates, revisions and comments, Manage WP comes packed with all the standard features and more. The latest version features enhancements to day-to-day management, plus a new pricing structure that will make the basic plugin free for an unlimited number of WordPress sites — good news for those of us who just can’t help ourselves to just one.

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The blank white page. The empty screen. The blinking cursor. If part of your job includes coming up with ideas and creating content — heck, if you’ve ever done any serious writing at all — you’ve probably spent plenty of time staring at new documents, willing the words to come.

We’ve all been there. It sucks. But if you’re going to run a blog, you’re going to have to, you know, blog, and that means opening up a New Post and putting some text in the box. In other words: You’re going to have to come up with something to say. Don’t panic.

Today we’re going to talk about where good ideas come from — specifically, where good ideas for blog posts come from. (Spoiler alert! It’s not just from inside your head).

Here are our five tips for coming up with new content for your blog.

1. Look for cues

No matter how uninspired you may find your everyday routine, it’s teeming with experiences and ideas ripe for blogging. A good writer is a good observer, so start looking for ideas right under your nose. It could be a snippet from a radio story you hear on your morning commute, a trend you notice in a report once you get to work, something someone says (or eats) at lunch time — anything at all.

2. Talk to your tribe

You may be the one doing the writing, but you’re not the one with all the ideas. Find the people who are talking about what you want to talk about, and talk to them (yes, that’s a lot of talking — but talking leads to new ideas!). Ask what they’re interested in. Ask what they already know a lot about. Learning from the best will lend credibility to your blog and give you confidence to take on that blank page.

3. Beg, borrow and steal

We would never promote ripping off a competitor’s ideas or words, but there’s much to be learned from the success of others. Keep apprised of what other companies and bloggers in your industry are up to, and don’t be afraid to borrow (or steal) a blog post topic to use yourself. If you want to keep your conscience clean and show gratitude, give your source some link love — who knows, you might even spark a conversation that inspires a whole series of posts!

4. Write what you want to read

People say all the time to “write what you know,” but as the writer John Gardner put it, “Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination than sticking with you know.” Instead, he argued, you should write what you know and like best.

This approach is great when you’re blogging about a topic you know well and care a lot about, but even if you’re new to the subject, you should be able to use Gardner’s advice to determine what your target audience wants to read about. What are people talking about and sharing? What are the gaps in the content that you could fill? The answers to these questions are the seeds of future posts.

5. Track your ideas

The thing about inspiration is that you never know when it’s going to strike. Ideas can be fickle and fleeting things — the best way to keep track of them is to record them and keep them someplace safe. Start a spreadsheet of all your half-baked ideas, add to it every day, and make changes as your blog evolves. When it comes to creating new content, there’s no better security blanket than a well-tuned backlog full of your own ideas.

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Finally, don’t be afraid to hit Publish. Some posts will get picked up and shared and commented on, and some posts won’t. Not every idea is a great idea, but when it comes to blogging, any idea is better than no idea — and a blog without posts is not really a blog at all.

The post Blogging basics: 5 tips for coming up with new content appeared first on Themezilla.

Running a website without analytics is like trying to navigate a foreign country without a map. You can move around, try to remember where you’ve already been, but you’ll never really know if you’re getting closer or farther away from your destination. Not all who wander are lost — but some are.

Analytics give you the ability to determine where you are and chart a course to where you want to go, providing plenty of helpful feedback along the way. They’ll tell you how many people your site attracts every month, where they’re coming from, what they like, what they don’t like, and how they behave. For data heads, it’s fascinating stuff. For everyone else, it can be a bit bewildering.

Google Analytics (or any of the other analytics suites available to WordPress users, for that matter) is an incredibly powerful tool, packed with advanced features that the average site admin frankly doesn’t need. Today we’re bringing you our Cliffsnotes guide to site analytics. If your eyes glaze over at the sight of a scatterplot or histogram, this post will familiarize you with all the features you need to know, without getting bogged down by baffling figures and graphs.

Site traffic

And the award for most obsessed-over site metric goes to… traffic! No surprises here, as traffic is also one of the most important metrics to watch. A high-traffic site is a happy site.

Total visitor numbers are a good indication of whether your site is growing, plateauing, or declining. They can tell you when you’ve done something right (e.g. when a spike corresponds with a bit of media coverage) or wrong (when a downturn parallels a change in content). However, traffic numbers can only tell you so much. You shouldn’t try to establish causality where there is none.

Traffic sources

As you might have gathered from the name, the traffic source metric tells you where your visitors are coming from. Google Analytics breaks traffic sources down into four broad categories: organic (search engines), referral (another site), direct (people typing your domain name into their browser), and social (social media).

You can use this information to determine the most effective ways of reaching your audience. It can also show missed opportunities. For example, if all your traffic is coming from Google and other sites, you might be overlooking social media as a traffic source. Try linking your site to a Facebook page and see if those numbers start to climb.

Top pages

No matter what kind of site you run and how much traffic it gets, you’ll find that the vast majority of visitors hit a small minority of pages. You can see your most popular pages by navigating over to the Behaviour section, where you’ll find the total number of page views for each page, as well as the percentage of traffic each receives.

The value of this data is self-evident: when you know what elicits the best response from your audience, you can produce more of it. If you’re starting to feel a little more comfortable with analytics and want to dig deeper into how users are engaging with your site, check out the Behaviour Flow Report. It’s such a pretty thing.

Bounce rate

We wrote a whole post on bounce rates a couple of weeks ago, but it bears repeating that monitoring your bounce rate and working to improve it will pay dividends in terms of visitor engagement, satisfaction, and, ultimately, conversion.

Unfortunately, bounce rates don’t tell you why visitors are bouncing or sticking around — you’ll have to do some qualitative research to find that out. Slow load times, unresponsive design and bad navigation are all common culprits, so if you can turn those around, you should be on your way to keeping your bounce rate down and your time on page up.

Conversion rate

When people hear “conversion,” they most often think of revenue — but that’s not all the term refers to. Depending on the type of site you run, a conversion could be a new subscriber, social share, product download, or any number of things. Maybe the best definition of conversion is something that’s good for you and hard to achieve — a measurable action by a visitor that benefits your business. Tracking and increasing conversions should be among your primary objectives.

To get started with conversion tracking, you need to set some goals. Google Analytics simplified the process with their goal templates tailored to businesses within specific industries, but you can also set custom goals. After implementing these, you can begin analyzing performance data across various visitor segments. Examine the path visitors took to complete the conversion, and see if you can replicate that in other sections of your site.

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By now, you should have a basic understanding of how analytics work. If used smartly, they can shed light on what’s happening with your site and help you make better marketing decisions. Of course there are way more analytics tools available than what we’ve covered here, but with these basics under your belt, you should be off to a great start!

The post A beginner’s guide to analytics appeared first on Themezilla.

If you’ve ever run a WordPress site for longer than a year or two, you know there comes a time when you feel like you need a change. Sometimes you’re just tired of looking at the same layout day after day. Other times, the design itself becomes outdated (flash intros, anyone?) and change is necessitated by evolving sensibilities or functionality.

Making the switch is a relatively straight-forward process, but there are five steps you should take before changing your WordPress theme. Here’s our guide for anyone out there itching for a change.

1. Decide which aspects of your current theme you want to keep

Before you begin thinking about your shiny new theme, make a list of everything you like and want to keep from your current theme. Often, people have made on-the-fly changes to their site’s .php files and forgotten about them, so you should review your current theme’s code and note all the additional bits that have been added.

2. Create a backup copy

Backing up your site should be standard practice, but it’s especially important before making any major changes. If you’re not already using a favourite backup plugin, grab the latest version of BackupBuddy, VaultPress or Updraft Plus, and install it on your site — right now. Once your new theme is running, don’t forget to schedule regular automatic backups so that your site files are always protected.

3. Put your site in maintenance mode

Think of maintenance mode as the velvet curtain you pull over your site while you get it prepped it for its grand debut. Depending on your site’s complexity, getting it up and running could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days. The last thing you want is for visitors to glimpse your half-finished, broken-down site before it’s ready.

WordPress offers a boatload of maintenance mode plugins that allow you to display a customized splash page explaining what’s going on and when you expect to be back online. When everything’s just so, you can pull back the curtain and bask in the glory of your brand new theme.

4. Run some tests

Once you’ve activated your new theme, it’s important to check that everything is working as intended. Test all the functionality of your site, including plugins, menus, sidebars and links. If you’ve installed any third party items, such as ads, widgets or buttons, you can also adjust the display colours and sizes so that they integrate seamlessly with your new theme.

Different browsers and devices render theme designs differently, so test your new theme for compatibility. Your site metrics can tell you how your audience is accessing your site. At a minimum, you should check to see that you’ve got the top browsers covered.

5. Tell your users about your new look and functionality

Even though it will probably be abundantly clear to anyone familiar with your site, it’s a good idea to let people know about your new look. Tell them about any new features and ask for feedback. Write a blog post, send a newsletter, or simply invite your Facebook followers to check out the new site. They’re gonna love it. Change is good.

The post 5 steps to take before changing your WordPress theme appeared first on Themezilla.

Now that we’ve made our case for blogging and sold you on why it’s awesome, you’re probably champing at the bit to get started.

There’s a ton of how-to guides and advice floating around the web, but most of them contain one tiny useful nugget and a whole bunch of stuff you don’t need. Unless you’re already a tech-minded, experienced WordPress user, tricking out your back end with a whack of plugins is not one of the first steps. You’ll get there — eventually.

Today we’re starting from square one. We’ll show you how to build a beautiful blog from scratch using the world’s most-used blogging and content management system: WordPress. Excited? So are we!

Follow your passion (just make sure it’s practical)

The single-most important decision you will ever make about your blog is also the first decision you need to make — what are you going to talk about?

You should be passionate about your blog’s topic. If you launch a blog about something that bores you, you’re a lot more likely to lose interest and stop updating it. Whether it’s electric cars or vegan cooking or personal finance, your topic should be something you care about and feel qualified to write about on a consistent basis.

Of course, there are also practical considerations in choosing your topic. Do some research into what other blogs exist in your subject area and think about how you will differentiate yourself. Make sure your topic is broad enough and rich enough to sustain over the long term. Also make sure there’s a market for it, no matter how niche.

Choose a killer domain name

Coming up with a good domain name for your blog can be a pain, especially when it seems like all the good ideas are taken. However, it’s a super-important branding decision and one that deserves some thought. Think of your domain name as a headline for your entire blog — relate it to the content you’ll create, keep it short, and unless you’re thinking of something like speedofart.com, stay away from underscores and hyphens.

If your blog is going to be attached to your company, the easiest (and arguably best) option is to go with your company’s name and bolster your brand recognition. If your blog stands on its own, or if you crave something more original, you can get creative with your name and choose something that ideally frames the experience people will have on your site (fun, informative, aspirational, etc.).

Once you’ve chosen a domain name, it’s time to pony up the cash and register it. GoDaddy is where most people start, but if you’d rather support an underdog, NameCheap and Hover both come highly recommended.

Get a reliable hosting service

At this point, you’ve made a couple of very important decisions for your blog — chosen a topic and selected a domain name — and now you need a place to put it.

Where you host your blog will impact your site’s performance and your wallet, so do your homework and be realistic about your needs. A bargain basement-priced GoDaddy plan might be okay for a while, but once traffic picks up, you’ll want to switch to something like Synthesis or SiteGround — services better equipped to support your success.

Select an awesome theme

If content is king, then design is God. No matter how good or plentiful your content, you’re probably not going anywhere as a blogger without a high-quality site design.

You could choose from one of the free themes available in WordPress.org’s theme gallery, but then you run the risk of showing up to the party in the same outfit as everyone else. Although free themes might seem like a great idea — they’re free, right? — investing in a premium theme early on helps you differentiate your site and gives you a lot more flexibility in the long run.

And if you’re looking for a beautiful, professionally-designed WordPress theme to get you started, we know just the place.

The post Blogging basics: How to build a blog from scratch appeared first on Themezilla.

Tags and categories are the DNA of WordPress. They form the unique structural framework of websites, and — like human DNA — they can be pretty bewildering.

Why are categories and tags so important? What’s the difference between them? Which one is better for SEO? A quick Google search reveals categories and tags to be one of the most misunderstood and misused features of WordPress.

The good news? We’re here to provide some definitive answers. If the average person can now access their own genetic code, surely we can crack content categorization and use its powers for good.

Talking terminology

If ever there was a singular frequently asked question about WordPress, it might be this: What’s the difference between categories and tags? It’s a good question, and one that’s already been explained many times, in many ways.

The clearest explanation we’ve heard is to think of your site like a book — if categories are the table of contents, tags represent the index. Like a book, categories are generally determined first and are broader in scope, whereas tags are more specific and can only really be added once the content is written.

Categories can also be hierarchical, which is to say they can have parent, child and sibling categories. This can be useful for more complex topics or in the case of very broad categories. There’s no such thing as a sub-tag, so rely on tags less for basic navigation and more for linking posts together and accurately describing your post’s content. Clear as mud? Let’s move on…

Categorizing and tagging like a pro

For most people, the process of categorizing and tagging is pretty ad hoc (to say the least). Choose a category from a list you developed ages ago, tag with reckless abandon, and call it a day. Needless to say, this isn’t the best approach.

Instead, start by thinking about your site’s content and how visitors might expect it to be organized. Aim for clarity and minimalism as you create new categories. While there’s no specific optimal number, you’re better off having five categories with 20 posts each than 50 categories with only two or three posts.

Also, there’s absolutely such a thing as over-categorization. Google debunked the “duplicate content penalty” eons ago, but there’s still no reason for a post to belong to a dozen different categories. Pick one or two that best fit your post and limit tagging to the most relevant topics covered (an endless stream of hashtags just makes you sound desperate).

Optimizing categories and tags for SEO

Most of us tend to think of tags and categories primarily as navigational elements, and that’s not wrong. Thoughtful classification facilitates navigation (and good user experience), but it also offers up opportunities for increased traffic and engagement that too often go to waste.

One of the best ways to harness the power of categories and tags is to link to them from within your pages and posts. These internal links help search engines find and index content, and the anchor text you set — your category and tag names — communicate what topics your site covers, allowing you to rank higher in those keyword searches.

A side-effect of consistent internal linking is that “link juice” gets passed around your site, including to older, archived pages. If you have one dynamite post that gets a lot of traffic and inbound links, using WordPress categories and tags to connect that post to others will elevate your entire site and greatly improve your overall SEO.

The post Making the most of WordPress categories and tags appeared first on Themezilla.

Content management system — sounds like the epitome of organization, doesn’t it?

Done right, it can be. But as anyone who’s ever tried to run one can you tell you, a squeaky-clean, clutter-free back end can quickly deteriorate into a mess of duplicate files and frustration.

For all the things we love about WordPress’s media library (drag and drop tools, super-quick load times, a built-in image editor), it offers surprisingly limited functionality when it comes to organization. WordPress 4.0 improved things by implementing a grid layout, but if you ask us, it could be doing a lot more to reduce the chaos of the average media library.

Here are some our our suggestions for achieving a beautifully streamlined, meticulously organized, and satisfyingly easy-to-navigate media library — the kind even KonMari could love.

Eliminate duplicates

You don’t need six identical black sweaters in your closet, and you don’t need a gazillion copies of the same photo clogging up your media library. One simple way of removing duplicates is to search for media with identical file sizes — a task easily completed with the Media File Sizes plugin.

To cut down on bloat, we suggest adjusting your media settings to make sure WordPress isn’t creating multiple sizes of every uploaded image. Unless you’re displaying thumbnails that link to larger versions, these extra files only complicate things. Here’s a quick tutorial on rejigging your media settings.

Downsize gigantic files

Any responsible site admin knows that resizing images is the right thing to do — it’s kind to the server and speeds up your site. But manual compression takes time, and sometimes you just don’t want to deal with scaling that 3MB image into something more manageable (and less imposing).

Enter Imsanity, the running mate of bleeding edge photographers everywhere. Like WP Smush and EWWW Image Optimizer, Imsanity automatically downsizes images to a more “sane” size. Use your Media File Sizes plugin to locate any old oversized snaps, and then shrink them to a size your site actually displays (generally, no more than 800px wide).

Take advantage of alternatives

Your media library isn’t your only source for images, and unless your site is a personal portfolio, it’s likely that much of your material already comes from external sources. Instead of searching out, downloading, uploading, and captioning external content (in other words, a real time-suck), use ImageInject to select from thousands of free creative commons images, complete with attribution links.

Improve your search

Chances are, once you’ve cut the fat, you’re still going to have hundreds of images in your library. And lacking a photographic memory for file names, or the patience to manually trawl through your entire library, you’re going to have to install yet another plugin to find your files.

Enhanced media library is exactly what it claims to be — a better way of managing your WordPress media library. It basically extends WordPress’s post taxonomies to images, meaning you can create custom folders (and folders within folders) for optimal organization. If you have more than a dozen files in your media library, you need this plugin and you needed it yesterday.

The post Make life easier by organizing your media library appeared first on Themezilla.

Don’t believe what you’ve heard — blogging isn’t dead. Sure, once-beloved platforms like LiveJournal and Blogger may have fallen out of favour, and “blogosphere” may no longer be something we say with a straight face, but blogging is alive and well and as important as ever.

Not convinced? Two words for you: content marketing.

Defined by the Content Marketing Institute as “a strategic marketing technique focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience,” content marketing is (at least in large part) blogging.

It’s also one of the fastest growing segments of all marketing, and if the 93 percent of businesses currently engaging in it doesn’t convince you that you (still) need a blog, perhaps the following will.

Drive traffic to your site

At last count, there were nearly 1 billion sites on the internet. So, how do you get visitors to land on yours? Not only does a regularly-updated blog provide your audience with interesting, topical content, it also increases the number of indexed pages and keywords on your site, meaning your site will have a better chance of showing up in organic search results and gain a higher ranking overall.

Gain influence and win friends

Know your stuff? Prove it to your visitors by posting fresh content that reinforces your expertise. When people trust you as an authority on your niche, they will be more likely to engage with your content, share it with their networks, and even advocate for your business.

Manage your image

People can say anything online — true or false, good, bad, or ugly. It’s easy to talk smack about a business when no one’s there to respond to it, so use your blog as a tool for managing your reputation and how you’re portrayed online. Respond to criticism and let visitors get to know you by sharing your voice, personality, and what you stand for.

Bolster your social media initiatives

It’s tough to be a social media maven without access to unique and interesting content. Retweeting shows that you’re active, but it can only take you so far — at some point you need to become the author, not the sharer of original, clickable content. Blogs are a great source, and sharing links with your networks will help you boost your social media profiles and direct more traffic to your website in one fell swoop.

Improve SEO

SEO is all about quality content that’s read and linked to by as many people as possible. Adding new content to your blog means building both a valuable resource for other bloggers in your niche and a strong base for inbound links. Along with consistent, high-quality content and a strong social media presence, these links can boost your SEO and generate significant referral traffic back to your site.

Much has been made of blogging’s decline in recent years, but it remains one of the most flexible and useful communication platforms out there. Investing as little as an hour a week to write a post for your blog can result in hundreds of visits from organic search results, inbound links, and social media shares.

Over the next month, we’ll be bringing you a series of posts on blogging. Whether you’ve been at it for years or are just getting started, we hope you’ll take something from it that helps you build a better blog for your site. Stay tuned!

The post Why you (still) need a blog in 2015 appeared first on Themezilla.

Some people view their site metrics the same way they view their bank statements: rarely and with trepidation. All those counts, percentages and graphs can be overwhelming — and in the case of the Big Bad Bounce Rate, downright scary.

It doesn’t have to be like that. Watching your bounce rate and taking the time to understand and analyze it can give you valuable insight into things like conversions and user satisfaction: important information whether you’re running an online business or writing a personal blog.

Defining bounce rate

Google analytics expert Avinash Kaushik sums up bounce rate as: “I came, I puked, I left.”

Put differently, bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits followed by no subsequent action other than leaving the site entirely. Someone lands on your site, blinks at it for a couple of seconds, then “bounces” off someplace else.

Of course, you’re never going to engage, sign up, and sell to every visitor to your site (nor should you try). Most experts agree that a bounce rate of 50-55 percent is acceptable, although it depends on the type of site (Neil Patel has a great infographic that delves deeper into benchmarks for specific site categories). Once you know where you’re at and what number to shoot for, you can set to work on making your site more clickable and sticky.

Study your traffic

Two questions every site operator should be able to clearly answer:

1. Who’s visiting your site?

2. What do they want?

A little market research goes a long way. If you don’t know who your target user is, it’s difficult to connect with them. Gather as much information as possible about your visitors — then shape your content and design accordingly.

Prioritize user experience

“UX” has been getting a lot of play lately, and for good reason. Good UX can mean the difference between someone landing on your site and spending several minutes exploring and engaging with your content, and someone taking one look and deciding it’s not worth their time.

So how do you improve user experience? Let us count the ways.

First and foremost, you’ll need a clear navigation system to guide visitors through your site. If you make your visitors hunt for information, they’re going to leave. 

Responsive design is another big one. You don’t want to make your site inaccessible to the 60 percent of people now accessing the web from mobile devices, do you?

Speeding up your site will also encourage visitors to pull up a chair and stay. According to KISSmetrics, sites that take more than four seconds to load are 25 percent more likely to have a higher bounce rate; for sites that take longer than 10 seconds, that bounce rate increases to 30-40 percent.

Make your site more clickable

This is what it’s all about, right? Getting a visitor to click somewhere (anywhere!) else beyond the homepage means that they’re reading and engaging with your content on some level and therefore not a bounce.

Encourage clicks by breaking up lengthy posts, providing relevant internal links, categorizing and tagging your posts in a value-added manner, and featuring top posts in either a sidebar or excerpts (then reward those clicks with fresh, attractive, killer content).

Embrace trial and error. Take the time to know your audience, implement some small changes, and watch the reaction. If you can meet visitors’ expectations for content and product, and streamline their experience with superior design, there’s nothing stopping you from getting a lower bounce rate for your site.

The post Getting a lower bounce rate for your site appeared first on Themezilla.

If you ask us, there is only one universal truth: people hate filling out forms. Whether you’re applying for a passport, filing an insurance claim, or trying to decipher the difference between a 1040, 1040-A, Schedule B, C and D, we can all agree that forms are the worst. Most designers don’t even like making them!

Despite their no-fun reputation and our collective disdain, forms are a necessary component of most sites — and, in the case of the contact page, an essential mode of communication between you and your user. On that note, here are five steps for a better contact form that’s less painful, more effective, and, dare we say it, maybe even a little fun.

Understand your visitors

Consider for a moment why people are on your contact page. If you’re a brick-and-mortar shop that sees a lot of local traffic, most visitors are probably looking for your business hours, address and telephone number. But if you’re a web-based business serving clients around the world, giving people a space to tell you about their project is far more important than a dot on a map. Think about what people want — then give it to them before they have a chance to ask for it.

Add a little something extra

Take a look at any basic contact page and you’ll find some version of the following: a generic invitation to Get In Touch, a simple enquiry form, and, if you’re lucky, a phone number and email address. While there’s certainly something to be said for simplicity, adding a few extra features like a map, hours of operation and FAQ page can go a long way towards anticipating user needs and save you the tedium of fielding the same questions over and over again.

Break from convention

The best contact forms are eye-catching, engaging and personal. Don’t shy away from bold colours and typography, and for the love of CAPTCHA, if you want to prompt visitors to action, come up with something more creative than “Complete the form below with your questions and feedback.” Most people know what a a contact form is and how to use one, so use yours as an opportunity to reinforce your brand and start a conversation with your users.

Pick your plugin

There are no less than 1,625 contact form plugins available in the WordPress directory, and many of the best ones are free to use. Features vary considerably across plugins, from simple forms to complex, multi-field questionnaires that use conditional logic to tailor the requested information.

Take matters into your own hands

While there’s no shortage of great contact form plugins, there’s also no shortage of reasons to build your own from scratch. Why weigh down your site with plugins that pack way more than you need, when a tidy bit of code will do? Check out this tutorial and you’ll be coding your way to a clean, customized contact form in no time.

The post 5 steps for creating a better contact form appeared first on Themezilla.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever plumbed the depths of your website’s archives for a post, only to find it on page 11 of the search results or not at all. It sucks, right?

WordPress’s default search function returns results based on keywords and in date order, but if your site has a large volume of articles dating back years, it can be harrowing trying to find the right results.

We’re not the first to point out the shortcomings of WordPress’s out-of-the-box search functionality, and perhaps because of that, many alternative solutions have popped up aiming to improve it. Here are our five favourite plugins for ratcheting up your WordPress internal search.

Relevanssi

With a 4.7 star rating and over 80,000 active installs, Relevanssi is the go-to plugin for enhancing your search experience. As its name suggests, Relevanssi prioritizes relevance over chronology, and includes unique features like fuzzy matching, boolean expressions and phrase searching. You can do a lot with the free version, but if things like multi-site support and export and import settings get you going, you’ll want to check out the fully-loaded Premium plugin.

Better Search

Better Search is a great little plugin if you want to improve functionality to your site while keeping things simple. As with Relevanssi, Better Search will generate search results that are relevant to both the title and content of the post, or you can fine-tune your settings to add greater weight to either the title or content. You can also track searches and display a “heatmap” of the most popular searches in your site’s footer or sidebar.

Google Custom Search

Want to harness the power of Google on your site? Google’s Custom Search is your golden ticket. You can opt to search just your site or across multiple domains and sites, plus choose from a variety of ways to display results. And, of course, being powered by the biggest name in web searching, you’re guaranteed accurate and speedy search results.

Search Everything

Search Everything does exactly what it says, allowing your visitors to search absolutely everything on your site. In addition to posts and pages, this includes comments, attachments, tags, taxonomies and custom fields. You can switch these on and off in the plugin settings, so your password-protected content will always be safe. The plugin also has a feature called “Research Everything” that makes it easy to find and link to previous posts.

Dave’s WordPress Live Search

If you’re looking for something that offers live search functionality and plenty of customizability, we know the guy for the job. Dave’s WordPress Live Search gives users instantaneous results as they type in the search field, directing them to articles as soon as it finds them. Results become more refined as the visitor keeps typing. And because Dave is such a thoughtful guy, he integrated his plugin seamlessly with Relevanssi for the ultimate in relevant live searching.

The post Turbo-charge your WordPress internal search appeared first on Themezilla.

It’s celebration time at Themezilla HQ — we just launched our newest theme, Hype.

Hype is a WordPress portfolio theme for modern creatives and agencies. Right away you’ll notice its customizable hero area, which features a beautiful image gradient and just the right amount of parallax. Portfolio posts are displayed in a grid-style homepage layout, with the option to showcase your entire repertoire or a curated selection of your latest and greatest work.

We designed Hype with two navigation options: a mega-navigation that spans the top part of your site, and a mobile-style “hamburger” icon that hides navigation unless clicked. Hype also comes with a unique blog and full multimedia support, so you can post text, images, video, audio, links and quotes.

Like all of our themes, Hype is 100% responsive. That means it’s optimized to look perfect on every browser, device and screen. It’s retina-ready, too, so it can handle your high-resolution images.

The best way to get a feel for Hype is to check out this live demo which lets you tour the theme in all its glory. You can also head to Hype’s theme page to learn about its other features.

The post Introducing Hype, a WordPress portfolio theme appeared first on Themezilla.

Content creation, social media management, comment moderation — managing a website can take up a lot of time. If, like most people, you don’t have all day to tinker around in Dashboard, you should get acquainted with some of the time-saving WordPress tools and tricks at your disposal.

By optimizing your workflow and setting up your site to do some of the heavy lifting for you, you’ll be able to save time, get more done, and maybe even relax a little.

Set it and forget it

Technology is all about making things more efficient, productive and fast. Many have called this a hollow promise (the two-day work week hasn’t yet become the norm), but technology can still be a huge time-saver, especially when it comes to performing simple, mundane tasks.

Tasks like sharing new content with social networks, performing on-page SEO, and warding off comment spam can all be automated, freeing up your brain for more creative, critical endeavours. WordPress’ Plugin Directory has a great collection of tools for automating your site.

Polish your shortcut skills

While it may not seem like manually inserting links and italicizing text take up much time, when you start counting the hours, days and weeks you spend editing posts, those mouse-clicks add up fast.

With the mouse destined for extinction and a growing number of users cutting the cord, you’re better off memorizing a few WordPress shortcuts and keeping your hands on the keyboard. Shortcodes, which we posted about recently, are another great way of cutting down on manual formatting time.

Master Markdown

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool that allows you to write in easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then translate it to HTML. Formatting a header is as simple as hitting the hashtag key; a secondary header is as simple as hitting the key twice.

Markdown is especially useful for developing consistency across your site. You can have multiple authors creating lists via a mixed bag of asterisks, pluses and hyphens, and Markdown will display it all in a cool, cohesive front.

Be ahead of the curve

Post-to-post blogging is no way to live. You should be able to take off on an impromptu, tech-free trip without worrying about your next post. This is where WordPress’ scheduling power comes in handy.

Instead of manually deploying each post, queue it up ahead of time by setting the time and date you’d like to publish. Plugins like Automatic Post Scheduler take this a step further, automatically scheduling drafts based on your preferred posting time and frequency. Fortune favours the organized.

The post WordPress tools and tricks to help you save time appeared first on Themezilla.

Email has been described as a soul-sucking distraction, counter-productivity tool, and old-school artifact that should have died around the same time as dial-up. And yet, some 40 years on — despite many reports to the contrary — it’s still here, not just enduring but killing it.

If you don’t have a consistent, high-quality email newsletter, now is a great time to fire off your first missive or revitalize a stagnant sending schedule. Whether your aim is to attract new customers, retain existing ones, or establish yourself as a person of taste and influence, a better email newsletter is the way to do it. Here’s how to craft a great one, from start to finish.

Come up with a compelling subject line

The typical corporate email users sends and receives around 105 emails per day. This includes coupons, password resets, social media notifications, office memos, dispatches from friends and reminders from Mom. Often, the decision to open an email comes down to its subject line: does it sound like a waste of time?

The best subject lines are descriptive, pithy and highly clickable. You should offer meaningful insight into why your newsletter is worth reading (“Joe Blow’s Weekly Update” doesn’t cut it) and steer clear of generic or cheesy sales speak. People prefer the personal to the scripted, a point exemplified by President Obama in his legendary “Hey” email campaign.

Write a superior snippet

Once your subject line has captured hearts and minds, it’s time to move on to the next hottest piece of real estate: the snippet. Too often, the snippet serves as a mini-prologue telling readers they can click to view a web version of the email — useful information, sure, but hardly worthy of top billing.

Instead, use this valuable space to foster a connection with your reader, build interest, and speak to a need or issue. Put some personality into your snippet and try to point out the newsletter’s “main attractions.” This is an opportunity to make your message stand out from the “Having trouble viewing this message?” crowd — don’t throw it away.

Make it easy on the eyes

Congrats! Someone opened your email. But before they read a word, they’re going to make a split-second appraisal of your layout and design. Is it clean, simple and mobile-responsive? Or is it garish, crowded and slow to load?

Pay attention to the header: it’s one of the first things to hit a recipient’s eye. It should instantly convey that you’ve taken care to craft a high-quality publication, not a trash-bound piece of junk mail.

Use evocative images to draw the reader in and break up larger sections of text, but don’t go crazy with fussy audiovisual elements. Check out Hubspot’s round-up of beautiful email marketing.

Craft your copy

Having settled on a design and layout, the only thing that remains is to write the thing. Feeling daunted? Remember that the best email newsletters are concise. Nail down a few section headings and then flesh them out with no more than one or two paragraphs apiece.

Readers aren’t going to linger all day on your newsletter — and the fact is, you don’t want them to. You want them to click a link to your site or fire off an email. Newsletters are a great way to start a conversation, so consider ways of getting people involved by including a survey or a competition.

Prepare for launch

As MailChimp puts it: “This is your moment of glory.” You’re about to deploy your message to the masses, but before you pull the trigger, test it out by mailing it to yourself first. No matter how many times you’ve combed through it, there are always things that can go wrong. Whether it’s a typo, broken link or wonky formatting, you want to catch these things while the stakes are low.

One last thing to consider is timing. While email marketers tend to favour Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings, it really comes down to demographics. If you’re targeting the young, tech-toting crowd, evening emails can be a good option. If your newsletter includes ideas for weekend fetes and activities, the much maligned Friday might be a good choice.

Whatever you decide, keep it consistent but not incessant — nobody likes a spammer.

The post A guide to creating a better email newsletter appeared first on Themezilla.

We live in a world of instant gratification and infinite distraction. From steady streams of information to constant interruptions from our phones, it’s not surprising that the human attention span is now less than that of a goldfish.

Every website’s goal is to cut through that noise, grab a user’s attention, and hold on to it for as long as possible. Longer visits don’t just translate to more engagements and conversions — they also mean better search rankings on Google.

With that, here are five ways of engaging users and keeping visitors on your website longer.

1. Put your best stuff above the fold

When people are making judgments about websites in 50 milliseconds, you can’t afford to do anything but lead with your best content. Remember: visitors come to your site in search of something. Include key information up front to show that they’re in the right place and that the content is relevant.

2. Prioritize credibility

You should establish yourself as an authority on what you’re offering, writing about, or selling. Do this by looking professional, checking grammar and spelling, keeping ads minimal and your content fresh.

Credibility is a slippery slope. It’s one of the hardest things to achieve and one of the easiest to lose — just like your visitors’ attention — but it’s a hallmark of pretty much any successful website.

3. Make your content readable

If you’ve ever clicked a seemingly innocuous link only to find an unwieldy block of text, you should understand how important readability is in keeping visitors. If the simple act of reading your content feels laborious, users will leave your website in search of the same information somewhere else.

To make information easy to find, try using bullet points and descriptive subheadings. It’s pretty well known that most people don’t actually read on the web — they scan and pick up the bits and pieces they’re looking for. By tailoring your format to suit online reading habits, you can create more engaging elements for your visitors and significantly reduce bounce rates.

4. Dare to be different

With all the cookie-cutter templates and listicles your readers wade through on a daily basis, it’s crucial to make your site stand out from the crowd. Grab visitors from the get-go with great aesthetics, and hold their attention with clear messaging and relevant content. Don’t fall victim to content mills and syndicated content — be imaginative in your posts and develop a unique voice for your site.

5. Experiment with multimedia

It’s rare to find a visitor who’ll sit captivated by a 2,500-word article, but present the same story in a video, infographic or image gallery, and you’ll find a whole lot more willingness to stick around. Who doesn’t love a good animal video?

Our brains gravitate toward novelty, so don’t be afraid to experiment with new and unusual ways of getting your message across. Here’s an interactive bag of tricks to get you started — and some examples of sites and storytellers that are nailing multimedia publishing right now.

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Remember that none of these tips will mean anything if you’re not tracking engagements and using all the data at your disposal. Dig into your analytics, make some changes and see what sticks. Almost all analytics providers will give you data on pages visited, time on site and bounce rate. Some will even tell you where users clicked or where their mouse hovered.

By monitoring your stats and employing some of the tips above, you’ll be better equipped to fend off distractions and keep visitors on your website longer.

The post 5 ways to keep visitors on your website longer appeared first on Themezilla.

WordPress themes are great: pick a design, plug in some content and your logo, and boom, you’ve got a functioning website in under an hour. It might even look good. 

That is, until you realize you picked the same theme as 3 million other people, and your portfolio looks a lot like this fashion blog and this local food directory and this save-the-date.

How do you break the mould and add customized content to your site without hiring a programmer or diving into a black hole of code yourself?

Say hello to the Shortcode API, one of the coolest and most accessible features of WordPress.

What are shortcodes?

Shortcode autocorrects to shortcake, which is apt, since shortcodes make code a piece of cake.

Whether you understand it or not, code makes up everything on your website. If you navigate to the “text” view of a post, you’ll see things like <a> tags (which define hyperlinks) and <p> tags (which create paragraphs). This HTML mark-up tells your website how to present your content.

What if you want to add a button or an advertisement to a post? That generally requires more complex coding. Shortcodes, however, allow you to distill large sections of convoluted, ugly code into a single line, tidily bookended by square brackets, to the same effect.

Shortcodes in action

WordPress lets you use shortcodes from its existing library, download them in the form of plugins, or write and register your very own shortcodes. Whether you’re a .com user or self-hosted, there are dozens of shortcodes available to you. Here are a few beginner-friendly codes to get you started.

To display a video and control screen width, insert this shortcode with the URL and desired pixel size:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/sneezingbabypanda&w=360]

To embed an Instagram image, simply wrap the URL in shortcode like so:

[instagram url=http://www.instagram.com/sepiatonedholidaysnap]

To create an archive page of all your previous posts, create a new page and insert:

[archives]

Piece of cake, right?

Shortcode plugins

The implementations above are both useful and intuitive. They do, however, require you to remember the shortcode itself. Shortcode plugins make life even easier, adding icons to the visual editor so you can add specialized elements like columns, toggles, pricing tables, image effects, and more.

We’re partial to ZillaShortcodes, but lately there’s been an explosion of great shortcode plugins that will have you adding style and functionality-enhancing elements to your site in no time.

Writing your own shortcodes

While a lot of people use basic WordPress shortcodes and plugins to add specialized content to their posts, comparably few venture into the theme functions.php file to create shortcodes of their own.

If you find yourself doing a lot of repetitive tasks in the post editor, or if you frequently require a specific format, it might be worth your while to make a shortcode for it. It’s not hard — you just need to create your function, register the shortcode by setting a unique name, and tie the two together.

The fine folks at Smashing Magazine put together a first-rate tutorial on creating custom shortcodes, so if you’re ready to get your hands dirty, head over right now and start streamlining your code.

The post Customize your site with WordPress shortcodes appeared first on Themezilla.

As a theme provider, we’re all about making things look good. With online visitors forming opinions in less than two-tenths of a second, we can’t overstate the value of visually appealing design. But standout images, slick icons and a sweet grid layout only go so far: without an equally strong back end, any immediate success you have will be tough to sustain.

The web is full of articles about useful front-end plugins. Their back-end counterparts, while often overlooked, are no less crucial in terms of design and functionality. Today we thought we’d focus on the workhorses of WordPress — the behind-the-scenes heroes that make your site better, faster, stronger.

Database and file backup

Everyone knows the horror of having a program crash, freeze, or unexpectedly log out when you haven’t clicked “Save” in a while. The rise of autosave has gone a long way toward mitigating such catastrophes, but it won’t protect you from hackers. A few lost paragraphs won’t seem so bad once you’ve had your site splashed with Wingdings or your entire client database spammed.

Fortunately, there are a number of WordPress backup plugins out there, including some that come bundled with hosting services. VaultPress, BackupBuddy and Duplicator are all popular options that get the job done, but for our money Updraft Plus is the best. It lets you schedule automatic backups of your WordPress site files, encrypt data, and upload to your preferred storage location. It also makes quick work of restoring or migrating a WordPress site. The free version is pretty feature-rich, and there are plenty of paid add-ons that give you even more functionality — and peace of mind.

Speed and performance

Page load speed is the single most important factor in creating a satisfying user experience. Still, many website owners ignore it in favour of “better” design, features and content. Don’t make the same mistake. Slow load times limit traffic, impact your Google search rank, and frustrate users.

Installing a cache plugin is the best way to speed up your site and keep visitors clicking something besides the back button. Cache plugins like W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache create static HTML copies of pages and temporarily store them until they’re needed. The next time a user accesses your site, they’ll already have a good portion of the files stored in a cache, meaning their browser will require less “fresh” information and be able to load the page exponentially faster.

SEO and analytics

Anyone with a website knows at least vaguely what SEO is. It’s that curious combination of keywords, content and backlinks that would launch you to the top of Google’s search rankings if only you could get it right. Many website owners are attracted to WordPress because it’s said to be SEO-friendly right out of the box. While there’s some truth to that, there’s a lot more you can do to improve upon whatever existing SEO capabilities the platform might have.

SEO by Yoast is a great plugin for many reasons. It lets you configure meta-descriptions for posts, pages and social media, as well as create XML sitemaps, bulk titles and description editors. You can also add Open Graph metadata Twitter Cards and opt to ping search engines whenever you update your site. With such a long list of features, there’s little wonder Yoast is one of WordPress’s most downloaded plugins.

Spam and security

Online security threats run the gamut from comment spam to crawlers and bots to serious targeted attacks. Activating Akismet and adjusting your comment settings should eliminate lesser threats, but to fully protect against spammers and hackers you’ll want install a security plugin like BulletProof or Sucuri Security. Both use .htaccess security protection to block attempts at code interjection and SQL interjection, which hackers use to add content to your site without permission.

Think your site’s too small-time for a major security threat? Think again. Of the 30,000 websites that are hacked daily, the majority belong to small businesses and personal bloggers. Don’t assume your website is secure just because it hasn’t been hacked in the past. When it comes to online security, you’re better safe than sorry.

The post Best back-end plugins for your WordPress site appeared first on Themezilla.

If you’ve ever questioned whether a blog post could change the world, Ethan Marcotte’s 2010 article on responsive design provides a definitive answer. The introduction of fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries has dramatically altered the way we design and interact with the web.

What was only a few years ago a niche trend among developers has quickly become the norm. Not everyone knows what “responsive design” is, but most web users have come to expect it.

Go mobile or go home

In case you hadn’t heard: mobile is king. With 60 percent of all web searches now taking place on mobile devices, Google decided earlier this year to reward responsive sites by making some changes to its search algorithm. The announcement prompted a torrent of apocalyptic speculation, with SEO marketers deeming the algorithmic shift “Mobilegeddon.”

Turns out the hysteria was a bit overblown. The day of the update came and went, and while some sites saw their rankings rise and drop correspondingly, it was hardly the end of the internet as we know it.

Still, mobile is extremely important and only going to become more so. Gone are the days when content and keywords were your only concerns: usability is a huge part of not just driving traffic to your site but keeping users happy. Ain’t nobody got no time for slow-loading, improperly-rendered pages.

Check yourself

If you’re still on the fence about responsive web design (known from here on out as “web design”), now is the time to blow the dust off your Google Analytics and see how many people  are visiting your site from a mobile device. Compare your desktop stats to your mobile stats: if your bounce rate is higher on mobile, while your average session duration and pages per session are lower, that’s a problem.

Besides Google Analytics, there are dozens of free tools for testing mobile optimization — though many would argue that the only one you really need is Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

Know your options

Failed the test? Don’t worry, it’s not the end of the road. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re essentially looking at two options: a mobile-friendly retrofit or a shiny new responsive build.

While retrofitting your current design to be responsive isn’t exactly beginner-level stuff (it will require creating a new viewport meta tag and a smattering of new CSS), it’s a reasonable fix if you’ve got a code monkey in your corner.

The new responsive build option, while not always cheap or fast, is arguably the better value and more sustainable choice. You can start by rebuilding the most frequently accessed pages on your site (usually the home and contact pages) and working outward until you’re fully mobile-friendly.

Now is probably a good time to mention that we make beautiful and responsive WordPress themes, with more than 20 premium designs to choose from. We’re also super friendly.

After the apocalypse

It’s hard to pin down how much of the web is now responsive (reports range from an optimistic 82 percent to a dismal 11.8). Whatever the truth is, it’s at once “a lot” and “not enough.” Anyone who’s done any browsing on a phone lately knows there are still plenty of awkward, slow, squished-looking sites out there.

As we scramble to keep up with the explosion of web-ready devices being released, rather than try to appease the Google gods, we should prioritize user experience. A responsive web is a better web. As Marcotte wrote in his blog post: “Now more than ever, we’re designing work meant to be viewed along a gradient of different experiences. Responsive web design offers us a way forward.”

The post Make your website responsive, for Google’s sake appeared first on Themezilla.

We use icons to convey ideas and actions in their most instantly recognizable terms, to save on space and lengthy explanations, and, if we’re being totally honest, because they look cool. But creating an icon that distills an object’s “iconic” features into something meaningful, functional and memorable is no easy task — especially when it needs to be as impactful at 256 pixels as it does at 32.

99% Invisible’s Roman Mars recently gave a TED Talk on the principles of flag design (vexillology for the crossword enthusiasts) that we think can be applied to all forms of design, including and perhaps especially iconography. With a little help from the North American Vexillological Association’s Five Basic Principles of Flag Design, here are some tips for making icons that make sense.

1. Keep it simple

To design a “kickass flag,” Roman recommends drawing a one-by-one-and-a-half inch rectangle on a piece of paper and designing within these dimensions — the idea being that a flag of this size held 15 inches from your eye looks about the same as a three-by-five foot flag a hundred feet away. The same approach can be applied when creating an icon. Overambitious, complex designs might look great in Photoshop, but view them on an iPhone and they become an indecipherable mess.

2. Use meaningful symbolism

The purpose of an icon is to represent a concept with a graphical symbol. Good icons don’t necessarily need to be self-evident, but they should be clear, memorable and enduring (just ask Scott Hanselman). Take the System Preferences icon on Mac OS X. It’s a detailed silver cog, which, on some level, we all associate with The Way Things Work. By contrast, VLC uses a traffic cone — not exactly the most logical choice for an open-source, cross-platform media player.

3. Use 2-3 basic colours

There are essentially two things that form the base of an icon: shape and colour. While we can think of a few “iconic icons” that feature polychromatic colour schemes (Google Chrome and Instagram come to mind) most effective icons are fairly restrained in their use of colour. More than three colours are hard to distinguish at 32 pixels and make the icon unnecessarily complicated.

4. No lettering or seals

This one probably pertains more to flags than icons (have you seen the flag of San Francisco?), but there are some significant disadvantages to using text in icons, too. First, text limits your reach to users who can read the language. Second, text is almost impossible to read in a small icon. Third, when you use text in app icons, the name of the app is also displayed, so the text is needlessly repeated.

And as for seals: do we really need more rising phoenixes?

5. Be distinctive or be related

As HBO’s Silicon Valley pointed out, the logos of top tech companies look strangely similar: “Twitter: lowercase ‘t’, Google: lowercase ‘g’, Facebook: lowercase ‘f’.” Hey, sometimes the good designs are taken. Instead of fixating on originality, it can be useful to research existing icons and adapt them to your own purpose and style. Using recognizable symbols, shapes and colours can create connectedness and meaning with a lot more ease than an original design.

The post How to make icons that make sense appeared first on Themezilla.

From a developer’s perspective, WordPress is a dream platform — it’s versatile, powerful and enticingly easy to use. But for the uninitiated business owner or creative, it can be a bewildering place. 

The good news is that there are plenty of great resources for learning WordPress. Some of them may come at a price, but when you consider the hand-wringing and wheel-spinning saved (not to mention the practical skills and knowledge gained), they’re totally worth the investment.

With 23 percent of the internet now running on WordPress, it’s the one platform that’s worth getting to know, whether you’re updating your site on the regular or just swapping out images now and then.

Here are a few tips for getting started teaching yourself the basics.

Hit the books

It might sound old school, but for some of us there’s nothing quite like cracking an actual book when it comes to learning something new. WordPress for Dummies is still a great primer for Dashboard rookies, as is Digging into WordPress. When you’re ready to take things to the next level and delve deep into custom plugins and navigation, check out Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog.

Ask an expert

A developer’s job doesn’t end once the code is written. A good one understands that building a website or theme is one thing — empowering people to use it effectively is another. Even veteran bloggers need a lesson (or five) when dealing with new plugins or unfamiliar functions, so don’t be afraid to speak up and ask for help from the pros. Your success is, after all, their success.

Embrace plugins

If learning the ropes over someone’s shoulder isn’t your bag, consider installing the WP101 plugin. The basic tutorial series includes 20 videos on the most popular topics (posts vs. pages, managing comments, etc.) and lets you learn right on your Dashboard without having to leave your site in search of a janky how-to video. We also recommend the pro-quality tutorials from Video User Manuals (learn in three different accents!) and Treehouse’s ever-excellent interactive education platform.

Crack the Codex

Up for a challenge? The WordPress Codex isn’t exactly geared at beginners, but it is the most comprehensive and up-to-date guide to all things WordPress. From themes to plugins to semantics, it’s all there — somewhere. The tricky thing about the Codex is that there’s so much content, it can be tough to find what you need. Plus, a lot of articles are written in a technical jargon, so if you’re someone whose eyes glaze over at the slightest bit of code, you may want to steer clear — for now.

Wing it!

With enough time and persistence, anyone can learn the basics of WordPress by simple trial and error. In fact, we think it’s one of the best ways to learn. You can pick up a lot just by poking around the Dashboard, so even if you’re not ready to fork over the cash for professional video tutorials or enter the Codex, you might be surprised at what you can learn on intuition alone.

The post Teach yourself the basics of WordPress appeared first on Themezilla.

If social scientists and literacy experts are to be believed, the internet has turned us into a bunch of skimmers and scanners, capable of digesting no more than 140 characters at a time and easily derailed by memes and clickbait. NPR drove that point home brilliantly with a provocatively titled article that exposed a crowd of so-called “readers.” (Gotcha!)

So how, in a world where most readers don’t even make it halfway down the page, do you get your content to stand out and make people actually pay attention? One way is to use visuals.

First impressions matter

Users make aesthetic judgments of websites in as little as 17 milliseconds, according to Google researchers. Compare that with a blink of an eye, which takes 300-400 milliseconds. If you had such a short amount of time to grab someone’s attention, would you show them an image or a block of text? Leading with an image engages readers and opens the door for what you have to say with words.

Something is not always better than nothing

As important as visuals are, you can’t just throw up any old image and expect your stats to skyrocket. A low-quality, pixelated image that obliquely references something in the text isn’t going to get you anywhere and may even detract from your content. At the very least, it will distract readers from the message you’re trying to communicate.

Good images illustrate and explain

While a picture may not be worth 1,000 words (cognition scientist Alan F. Blackwell pegs it closer to 84.1), images convey meaning much more succinctly than text. Instead of writing a paragraph about something, try using an image that clearly and simply illustrates your point. When users can instantly understand your message without having to wade through cumbersome, unexciting blocks of text, they’re much more likely to stick around.

Use stock photos sparingly

Eye tracking studies show that stock photography is largely ignored on the web. We’ve seen enough smiling, generic-looking nobodies selling insurance and IT services to last a lifetime. However, when used thoughtfully and sparingly, stock images can still be impactful. We have a soft spot for Stocksy, a cooperative that prioritizes high-quality photos and fair pay for photographers. Or, if you’re strapped for cash, microstock sites like these ones are a great place to find images — gratis!

Don’t be afraid to DIY

If you own a smartphone in 2015, you already own one of the best compact cameras on the market. It’s always with you, it’s easy to use, and it makes uploading and sharing images a breeze. Even if you don’t fancy yourself a photographer, creating usable, high-quality images for your site is totally feasible. Check out these tips for improving your phone photography skills, then up your game with these photo editing and management apps.

The post Good images make for good content appeared first on Themezilla.

When thinking about user patience, it’s easy to get caught up worrying about load times. Now, that’s obviously an important consideration for any website — but it’s not the total package.

Bad design wastes time

In our previous posts about building trust with users, we’ve talked about communicating trust and putting users first. Another element of a trustful relationship is respecting users’ time.

Ask yourself how much time you’re willing to spend on a website without finding the information you’re looking for. If you’re like most people, the answer is only a few seconds. After that, you’re likely to hit the back button and continue on your quest for information someplace else.

Page layout matters

Specific headings and a non-fussy navigation menu can both go a long way in directing users to the information you’re trying to provide. Another important consideration is a balanced page layout that communicates information clearly and efficiently.

This Creative Bloq article gives a terrific overview of page composition and steps for creating a good layout, from employing a grid to white space to the Rule of Thirds. It’s well worth a bookmark.

Most readers are scanners

A common mistake by amateur copywriters is the stubborn, sepia-toned belief that users will read any text that’s put in front of them. In reality, most users will give only a quick scan of the text on a page. If it interests them, they may double back to read the words — or they may not.

For this reason, it’s important to structure your text so that it’s understandable even at a glance. Line breaks, subheads, lists, and other types of formatting can help you get your message across in a world where the written word gets smaller and smaller every day.

Readability is huge

Even if most users are only scanning your page, making your text readable is one of the most important things you can do for your website. Font size, colour, line length, spacing, and alignment all contribute to readability. In the case of designing text, it’s not about standing out — it’s about understanding and respecting reading habits established over thousands of years of human history.

Don’t forget load times

At the end of the day, your website’s performance is inextricably linked to its load time. You might not gain any users with a lightning-fast page speed, but you will lose them if you’re too slow. Thankfully, there are plenty of good resources out there about how to decrease your page’s load time.

The post Always design for the most impatient user appeared first on Themezilla.

“Sign up now” doesn’t get anyone excited. Maybe it used to, many moons ago, in an age of primordial calls to action. Now, people see those words every day, on almost every website they visit.

When adding a call-to-action button, a good question to ask is: What sets your site, mailing list, or service apart? How are you providing value to the user immediately after that first click?

What’s a call to action for?

Whether you’re asking a user to sign up for an account, view the products in your store, or pay you for a service, a good call to action should function in the same way: as an invitation to solve the user’s problem.

So, how does signing up for yet another mailing list solve anyone’s problem? If the problem you’re solving is subtle, you may need to remind the user what that problem is and how it can be solved. Perhaps “Sign up now” is truly the best text for your call-to-action button—in that case, how can you make signing up look appealing to someone who is sick of signing up?

This all ties into your site’s larger strategy and purpose. But it also comes down to how much you can optimize your call-to-action button via context, text and appearance.

Placing a call-to-action button in the right context

What information does the user need to make sense of your call to action? How quickly and concisely can you provide that information?

Take a service like Duolingo, shown in the screenshot below. They contextualize their call to action perfectly, with six words and a simple message. They communicate the service provided, why it’s valuable to potential customers, and where to get started.

A more complex service like Basecamp requires more context, and possibly more incentive. A two-month free trial lets users experiment before committing to a paid plan for their business.

Getting the text perfect

Text is another opportunity that many call-to-action buttons take for granted. In the Duolingo example, “Get started” is a simpler and probably more appealing message to users than “Sign up now”. Basecamp adds specificity and a human touch to their call to action. (What a kind and philanthropic gesture!)

Instead of “Shop now”, you could be more specific, depending on your offering: “Shop summer” or “Get shoes”. Instead of “Sign up now”, you might soften the language with something like “Receive our newsletter”.

Ideally, you want users to understand your product or service before they reach the call-to-action button. But sometimes the words you use in your call to action can really drive the message home. Text like “Download the entire book for free” or “Find out how much your old clothes are worth” might even be necessary to get your point across.

Making the call stand out

Even the the most effective call to action can lose its effectiveness if it’s tough to find on the page or just plain hard to look at. That’s why we’ve learned to appreciate a stylish and well-placed call-to-action button, like this one from Spotify:

Right there, the user has all the information he or she needs. It’s specific, easy to read, and placed against an attractive image that adds an element of freshness to the call to action.

Make it easy for people to put up with signing up

Maybe a user won’t like Spotify’s terms of service or the price hike after three months (to say nothing of their new logo). But the call to action makes crystal clear what’s being offered, where the value of that offer lies, and why users should at least give “Premium” a try.

It might take you several tries to get your call to action right. A/B testing is a good way of playing around to find a message that works. And keep an eye out as you’re browsing the web: if a particular call-to-action button catches your eye, you might ask yourself: why?

The post Best practices for call-to-action buttons appeared first on Themezilla.

A couple posts ago, we wrote about taking the time to create better screenshots. It’s important to get those details right, but you also need to be smart with your time. You can spend hundreds of hours making the most beautiful, polished, well-marketed project in the world, but if you’re not giving ample time to planning and research, you could be forced to watch it fail.

Doing your research

We can’t do your research for you, but we’ve collected a few of the resources we love and go to for help when we’re building a new WordPress theme. Whether you need to improve your research methods or just find a better tool for your next project, we think these links are top-notch.

The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Design Research

If you’re just getting started, UXBooth’s guide is pretty complete—and won’t cost you a dime. It’s a great reference if you need something re-explained clearly and concisely.

Just Enough Research by Erika Hall

Erika Hall’s book gives a clear, concise look at the research process from start to finish. If we had required reading at the office, this book would definitely be included. Most of us have read (and loved) it.

Design Research Techniques

This one’s a great resource if you’re looking for a new way of thinking about something. It’s packed with frameworks and thought technologies that can change the way you think, period. But it won’t help you implement those changes.

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You may have seen this already if you’re reading Designer News on a regular basis—but it’s definitely worth revisiting. An expansive list of creative tools and websites, it makes our work easier and more efficient. And it’s organized pretty well, to boot.

What resources do you keep going back to?

If none of these links are the one for you, have no fear. The internet is a veritable treasure trove of time-saving and work-enhancing resources—especially if you’re a designer. Though sometimes you might have to wade through overwhelming lists to find the right ones.

One of our favourite ways of discovering new stuff is Hack Design, which delivers a few links to your inbox every week to educate (or re-educate!) you about web design. We love how it explains design concepts and reminds us to think again about those concepts we thought we understood.

If you have any helpful links you’d like to share in the comments, we’d love to check them out!

The post Better resources for planning and research appeared first on Themezilla.

No theme is for everyone. Those WordPress themes marketed as “all purpose” may be great for a lot of things, but they also have their weaknesses.

At Themezilla, we believe that the best themes do one thing really well. Whether it’s a portfolio theme like Frame or a full-width theme for businesses like Hanna, we build our themes by identifying a problem and designing a highly specific (but still flexible!) solution. Picking a theme that doesn’t quite fit your use case can lead to a lot of unnecessary work repairing details and having to rethink how content is displayed.

Limitations aren’t the enemy

There’s power in simplicity. A good WordPress theme gives you the foundation you need to run a beautiful website, along with the flexibility to make it your website and not some weird, impersonal template. Limitations exist to save you time, help you control your content, and keep every aspect looking sharp within the context of the theme.

We make every design decision, right down to the finest details, with the hope that the theme helps the majority of its customers succeed—straight out of the box.

What to look for in a theme

When looking for themes ourselves, we make a lot of considerations. Generally speaking, we make sure we know what kind of content will be filling the theme, what assets we already have (logos, marketing images, custom fonts, etc.), and roughly what look and layout we’re after.

Here’s a more specific checklist:

1. What do you need from your layout?

Do you require more than a simple page layout? Something better suited for an image gallery, or maybe for a podcast episode? Simple and familiar layouts are great—people understand how to interact with a simple, single column layout. But maybe you need two or three different layouts for two or three different types of content you hope to be posting.

2. Will my content make sense at any screen size?

Whether your content is being viewed on a four-inch phone screen or a huge HD television, it’s important to look good. Too-wide themes will make your content look sparse. Themes without solid mobile versions create bloating. Look at a theme’s demo and make sure you examine every page and every detail. You might require a theme with a narrower max-width, multiple columns, or a completely different way of displaying your content.

3. What elements am I likely going to want to change?

If you’ve spent quality time with a theme’s demo, you probably already know a few things you don’t like about it. Maybe it’s the way the date is displayed on posts. Maybe it’s the overlay that appears when you hover over an image. If they’re just minor quibbles, the theme could still be worth buying. And if you’re comfortable adding your own custom CSS, hiding or changing those details might only take a few minutes.

4. What third-party integrations do I need most?

Most WordPress plugins will work with your theme and the latest version of WordPress, but that doesn’t mean they’ll all look good. Maybe Ultimate Social Media and Share Icons doesn’t match the theme you’re considering, or The Events Calendar’s CSS stylesheets require special attention. Sometimes a theme has everything you need right off the bat—and sometimes it requires you to sit down and decide how much extra time you’re willing to put into it.

5. How is the theme provider’s support?

If you can’t find answers to your questions by looking at a theme’s demo or documentation, you should reach out to the provider. Their response can help you decide if the theme is right for you, and determine what kind of service to expect if you run into issues in the future.

There are too many questions

We’ve barely scratched the surface, but it’s these types of forward-thinking questions that get you closer to choosing a theme that works. Saying, “I like this, I don’t like this,” is an okay first step, but it’s not enough. Go deeper, get a clearer idea of the type of content you’re creating, and you’ll end up with a much better, more useful website.

The post Five questions to ask before buying a WordPress theme appeared first on Themezilla.

We closed our first post about building trust through web design with a question: What is it about your favourite websites that keep you coming back?

We can think of many answers to this question, but here’s one really important one: The websites we love most make it easy for us to get the information we need.

Where content meets user experience

The first post focused on how good content establishes trust with users and keeps them coming back. Content is a major part of the user experience, but it’s not the whole package. User experience is about how well a page flows, how easy it is to interact with, how logically its information is displayed, and whether it acts more like your best friend or your dad.

You may have seen a customer feedback form floating in the corner of a site, like on Campaign Monitor’s support portal. It’s not beautiful, but it’s discreet and effective, and it’s definitely not a popup.

Unfortunately, many websites use louder and more intentionally disruptive ways of getting users’ attention. When we’re reading great articles about email subscription pop-ups, we don’t want to be interrupted by a popup that—while relevant—distracts us from the subject matter. Especially to the point where we can’t continue reading what we were reading at all.

Always put your user first

We’re not saying, “Never, ever use a disruptive popup.” We’re saying it’s easy to lose readers, and you need to build an experience that keeps them engaged. Katie Sherwin’s article Low-Contrast Text Is Not the Answer points out another way that many sites don’t properly serve their user. According to Sherwin, the more difficult a site is to read, the more difficult it is to use. Users might not perceive that the text is hard to read—but they could misread something, miss a button, or struggle to find information if it’s in a weird place.

There are all kinds of ways of unknowingly putting your user second, and you probably won’t catch all of them. Fortunately, there are also plenty of ways to test design and test for usability. If you don’t have the time or resources for intensive testing, you’ll need to get creative.

Watch how users use your site

Testing isn’t foolproof, but it should give you an idea of what does and doesn’t work on your website. Even getting one friend to use your site while you watch over his or her shoulder can reveal problems you didn’t know existed. If you can get more than one friend to do this, that’s even better.

It’s all data, and it’s all important. Don’t forget to take notes!

The post Build trust by putting yourself in your user’s shoes appeared first on Themezilla.

WordPress celebrated its twelfth birthday last month. Today, it’s more popular than ever before. Twenty-three percent of the internet runs on WordPress, and that number is constantly growing.

This year is going to be an especially big one. Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com, recently acquired WooThemes, a theme and plugin provider that happens to be really good at ecommerce. You might have already heard of its popular WooCommerce plugin, which turns WordPress into a platform to manage your online store.

Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic and co-founder of WordPress, recently explained on WP Tavern’s WordPress Weekly podcast the four key areas he thinks will move WordPress forward over the next couple of years. Here’s a quick breakdown of those four areas.

The REST API

WordPress’s REST API takes a huge step in helping WordPress stay future proof. The API makes it easier for a WordPress installation to talk to other web applications, meaning you can do more stuff with WordPress more easily.

Most of us won’t notice the difference the REST API makes, but it will help streamline WordPress development. So, as long as developers keep working on WordPress, the platform will be able to grow even more rapidly.

Jetpack

Jetpack is a WordPress plugin, developed by WordPress.com, whose modules make your site even more powerful and personalized. Its extensive and growing list of features can be found on Jetpack’s homepage.

While Jetpack isn’t necessary to create a successful site, it gives WordPress administrators certain luxuries that other, more expensive websites now consider standard. It’ll be exciting to see what else the Jetpack team has planned for the future.

WooCommerce

Mullenweg’s post about the WooThemes acquisition sent a clear message: it’s time for WordPress to get serious about ecommerce. In the past, starting an online store with WordPress hasn’t been the easiest thing. But with Automattic and WooThemes now working together, it shouldn’t be long before WordPress becomes a super smooth, incredibly affordable ecommerce platform.

WordPress.com

As a hosted platform, WordPress.com takes WordPress’s pain points and creates a better user experience for creators who don’t want to learn how to manage the technical parts of their websites. We can see how the REST API and WooThemes acquisition will make WordPress.com a better service. Who knows what other plans are in store for the website?

There’s lots more to be excited about

Over the last few months, WordPress has begun testing international theme and plugin directories and released extended character and emoji support. It also looks like menu customization will be available in the 4.3 release. Suffice to say, WordPress has no plans of slowing down anytime soon.

The post What’s next for WordPress? appeared first on Themezilla.

Trust takes time to establish in any relationship, especially on the internet. Some people trust quickly and some trust more slowly. Websites may seem like fairly flat objects, but if at any point a visitor doesn’t trust a website, they’ll leave.

Trust is about posture

You might not be friends with your users, but you can sit up straight and treat them like friends. More than that, trust is about confidence and integrity. Friends don’t constantly try to sell you a product, spam you, or communicate in a way that’s hard to understand. Friends trust friends to be open, honest, and acting in service of friendship.

Good content creates trust

You start by making sure your content is good. That includes everything outside of a site’s code: menu options, buttons, images, sign-up language, the list goes on. All of this content should communicate its message clearly and not act like a jerk.

We’ve all tried to read articles on websites and been interrupted by banner ads, inline ads, and login prompts. How do you, as a user, react to those kinds of invasive advertising and engagement tactics? What about broken links? Weird or bad page layouts? Pages that are impossible to read on mobile devices? Slow load times?

Why would anyone trust a website that doesn’t work, make sense, or value its users’ time?

Communicate trust with every detail

You might be reading this post and thinking you’ve been building trust with your users all along, without ever considering it. If that’s the case, great. You’re doing something right.

We think you have an even better chance of succeeding if you take a moment to consider your users’ perspective—to step into their shoes and really think about what you can do to earn and nurture their trust. (Better yet, really test your content.)

Instead of trying to cram a book’s worth of information into one post, we’re going to spread it out. We’ll sign off now with a question we think about a lot, which we’ll return to in future posts: What is it about your favourite websites that keep you coming back?

(Hint: If you trust what they have to say, there’s probably a good reason why…)

The post The importance of building trust with users appeared first on Themezilla.

Whether it’s your own project blog or a blog on your clients’ website—old, out-of-date posts don’t look good. It’s not hard to find sites where WordPress’s Hello World! post is still live.

There are plenty of good reasons to keep an up-to-date blog. But if you aren’t already setting aside time to update your blog regularly, you probably never will.

Users will notice when your blog hasn’t been updated in years. It sends the wrong message, undermines your credibility, and encourages readers to look elsewhere for more current information.

Good blogs are consistent, but good websites don’t always need to be

You can post as much or as little as you want and still have an effective blog. Being consistent is key. If you’re going to blog, even just once a month, and your audience comes to expect that from you, keep to your schedule.

If you can’t keep a schedule or only have new content worth posting now and then, get your message across some other way. Mailing lists and social media are a good start. There’s also nothing wrong with using static pages to feature irregularly added (but important!) content.

There’s a site called Palantir that knows exactly the kind of content its users are looking for. It gives that content its own beautiful page instead of burying it in a blog somewhere.

Just disable the blog already

Not that long ago, WordPress was primarily a blogging platform. Today, that’s far from the case. WordPress now powers everything from business marketing sites to portfolios to ecommerce stores—but its blogging roots remain. You can’t fully remove that blogging functionality (or not easily, anyway), but you can hide it from your users and even the dashboard.

If you’re not using WordPress as a blog, you probably already have a static front page set up. In most cases, you’ve probably already disabled comments on your pages, too. (If you haven’t, the No Page Comment plugin is thorough and fantastic.)

If you want to remove Posts and Comments to simplify the dashboard menu for your clients, you can create custom user roles. There’s also a WordPress plugin called Admin Menu Manager that allows you to reorder menu items by dragging-and-dropping—and the soon-to-be-released version 2.0 includes new features that allow you to remove menu items entirely.

We really do love blogs, though

Here’s the part where we encourage you not to disable your blog. You have something unique and valuable to say, and you can use that to create an ongoing conversation with people who care about the same stuff.

Your posts don’t need to be long. They don’t need to change anyone’s life. Just share what you think is interesting—your readers might find it interesting, too.

The post Disable your WordPress blog (if you’re not using it) appeared first on Themezilla.

Creating excellent screenshots of your work isn’t as straightforward as you’d think. Especially if you’re trying to highlight the finer details in your latest designs. There are tons of great iPhone mockups (like these amazing mockups for Sketch curated by Meng To) that you can use to frame your screenshots. And there is no shortage of browser mockups, either.

But if you need to resize screenshots at all, text and icons can get distorted—or they can lose their appeal all together.

We run into this whenever we’re getting marketing content ready for a new WordPress theme. In the screenshots, we need to be careful that the typography doesn’t become too blurry. It’s a shame because we spend a lot of time trying to get our fonts just right—and blotted, pixelated text doesn’t show users all that attention we’ve put into the details.

Creating detail shots as additional images

Additional images that focus on the details are always a good idea. Whether you’re using a loupe or creating magnified screenshots, these images will help bring attention to anything a viewer could pass over on first glance. For lots of projects, detail images will be absolutely necessary.

We use loupes to highlight settings on pages with lots of settings. It takes the focus off the small, out-of-focus details, and makes the in-focus details clean and crisp.

But detail-oriented images aren’t always the solution.

It doesn’t change the fact that the zoomed-out overviews have blotches or other flaws. In some cases you could get away with an imperfect screenshot—but in our opinion it’s better to be completely 100 percent confident in every image. Even if it takes a bit of extra work.

Why not post full-resolution screenshots?

Full resolution screenshots can be incredibly large files. And you’ll lose users if your page loads too slowly. You might also run into issues with server space. Most importantly, WordPress doesn’t scale and resample images as well as you can yourself. So those details you hoped to preserve might look terrible as a result.

Edit the details in your screenshots

If you’re lucky, you might be able to just sharpen your scaled-down image so the text looks more like text and icons look more like icons.

In extreme cases, you can recreate the details in your scaled-down image and place them over top of the images. As weird as it might sound, I retyped the screenshot text in this screenshot for our theme Render. I whipped up some text boxes and used them to cover the original text.

The result is an image with much clearer text details. In the image below, you can see the unedited mockup on the left, and the edited mockup on the right.

Don’t forget about file format

Although JPGs are generally smaller files, you might want to use PNGs for your screenshots to prevent visual distortion. Pretty Darn Cute Design has a great article called PNG vs JPG that lays out what can happen to an image that’s compressed as a JPG.

Take your time and get it right

Whether you’re an agency, a freelancer, or you’re setting up a new site for a client, you need to remember that your site is where people will see your work first. It’s hard to showcase web design through images—but when you have to, it’s worth it present yourself absolutely perfect.

The post How to create better screenshots for your site appeared first on Themezilla.

In the last few weeks, the WordPress.org team discovered three critical security vulnerabilities, which have all been taken care of thanks to the WordPress’s timely patchwork. You can read about the issues and how they were fixed on WordPress’s release posts for 4.2.1 and 4.2.2. Two of these vulnerabilities make it much too easy for bad apples to compromise your site.

If you’re interested, you can read in detail about every security update WordPress has ever released.

WordPress security is important

Even giant corporations like Sony, AOL, and eBay have had some major security leaks—and they have dedicated security staff. If you want to keep your data safe, the least you can do is upgrade WordPress whenever updates are available.

You can even configure automated background updates for minor releases to make things easier for yourself.

You’re not safe until you upgrade WordPress

We just want to make sure you’re taking the proper precautions! These security issues only go away after you’ve upgraded. So if you haven’t already, please take the WordPress team’s suggestion seriously and upgrade as soon as you can.

WordPress plugins can breach security, too

If you’re using lots of plugins on your WordPress install, we’d recommend installing Plugin Vulnerabilities, which is a plugin that keeps tabs on your other WordPress plugins to make sure your site remains safe and secure.

There’s also the WPScan Vulnerability Database, which you can subscribe to via email.

On a lighter note: WordPress 4.2 brought Emoji to WordPress!

If you hadn’t already heard, WordPress 4.2 Powell includes extended character support, meaning you can now use Chinese, Japanese, and Korean language characters, as well as hieroglyphs, math, and music symbols—and Emoji. Score.

The post Why you should always have the newest WordPress appeared first on Themezilla.

We’re constantly on the lookout for tools and resources that help us work better. A lot of the things we try don’t stick, but every so often we come across a real gem that helps us design, develop, or just think smarter.

Previous to now, Themezilla’s blog has mostly been about our themes, but there’s a lot more we could be giving back to the community. So, we’re relaunching our blog with a focus that goes beyond just us: tips, tricks, tools, and maybe a little fluff. Now there’s no excuse for us not to share the good stuff.

We make WordPress themes for a living, so a lot of the blog’s focus is going to be on what WordPress is really capable of. But we’ll go beyond that, too. If you’re creative, work with clients, run a small business, or all of the above, you’ll find something worth reading.

Here’s a little taste of what you can expect over the coming months…

The best web design

WordPress or not, we love seeing web design that pushes the limits of what we think websites are supposed to look and feel like—sites like Christian Blüemelhuber’s or PowaBand. We want to make sure great work gets the appreciation it deserves.

Design resources

We wouldn’t be creating themes the way we do without all of the icon sets, Chrome extensions, Sketch plugins, and Photoshop templates we use every day. Not to mention the powerful articles about design that change the way we think. We owe so much credit to other creators, and we hope to share the wealth by creating some useful stuff ourselves.

Business 101 for designers

We’ve made more than a few mistakes over the years, many of them simple business or process problems that could have been avoided if we’d just known what to look out for. Whether you’re a freelance designer, the head of an agency, or a player on a large team, chances are you’re up against many of the same challenges. We’ll be sharing some of our experiences so that you can avoid the same pitfalls.

A better WordPress for designers, developers, and everyone

There are a lot of WordPress resources out there, but not all of them are easy to find, up-to-date, or well documented. We want to help you perfect your workflow by pointing you towards the best WordPress plugins (and our plugins), tools, tricks, and design assets. It’s only right.

That’s the start. Like any good blog, things will probably evolve over time—we’ll see where it goes. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions or feedback, drop us an email at feedback@themezilla.com.

Stay tuned!

The post What you can expect from the new Themezilla blog appeared first on Themezilla.

Today we pushed Storey 1.2, which improves the way the theme loads its hero, slideshow, and main portfolio images images. Storey now serves smaller images to devices with lower screen resolutions—like phones, tablets, and those computers you don’t use anymore. This means that your site will load more quickly than ever. With Google pushing mobile friendliness pretty hard, we thought we should get this out the door sooner than later!

The post Storey 1.2 appeared first on Themezilla.

We just released Versed 1.2 with a brand new “Load More” button that lets readers pull more posts onto the blog index. See it in action on the demo. We appreciate your need for non-traditional pagination, and we appreciate your need for style. Thanks for all your feedback, and keep up the good work!

The post Versed 1.2 appeared first on Themezilla.

We’re proud to announce our latest theme, Render. It’s a clean WordPress theme for blogging, built for creative agencies and designers. Render boasts an immersive video header with optional overlay effects, infinite sidebar widgets, and beautiful longform post styles. This theme is perfect for sharing your creative vision, spreading your ideas, and creating a resource for others.

This theme is full of all the usual goodness you’ve come to expect, and is remarkably simple to set up. You can rest easy knowing it’ll do your content proud. Check out the theme page or the live demo to see why we are so excited about Render.

The post Render: The Designer’s Blog appeared first on Themezilla.

Built for a better reading experience, Versed is designed with magazine blogs, podcasters, and solo bloggers in mind. It boasts an immersive homepage layout that is easily customizable to suit your content, read times for posts, and plenty of other features that are bound to impress.

Versed comes packed with all the goodness you expect from a Themezilla release, and can be set up in a flash. Check out the theme page or the live demo to see for yourself.

The post Versed: Our Latest Creation appeared first on Themezilla.

Hanna has been an incredibly popular portfolio theme. Since its release we’ve heard your requests for a single-column blog option, and taken them to our developers. Check out the two blog layouts in the demo to see how they look. It’s the same Hanna, but more customizable. We think you’re gonna be pleased with this one!

The post Hanna 1.4 appeared first on Themezilla.

We’re kicking things off in 2015 with a new WordPress theme for the collection: Motive, designed for agencies and creatives to convey their message with strength and simplicity.

This one’s got loads of neat features, including a flexible homepage, cool CSS3 animations throughout, and both masonry and single-column blog layouts boiled in.

Motive is packed with all the goodness you’d expect from a themezilla realease, it’s ideal for showcasing a product or body of work and comes with a fully responsive user experience. Check out the theme page or the live demo to see for yourself!

The post Introducing Motive: A New Theme For a New Year appeared first on Themezilla.

We’ve been working extra hard to bring you streamlined, powerful WordPress themes and are proud to introduce our latest addition, Storey. This is a multifaceted theme, designed to stylishly communicate the narrative around your business, app, product, or portfolio. It is super flexible and comes ready to go with auto-formatting for widgetized sidebars, endless accent colour options, and a fully responsive design.

Storey is loaded with all the goodness you’d expect from a themezilla realease and it’s ideal for showcasing a product, but suits a whole range of purposes. We think you’ll love it. Check out the theme page or the live demo to see for yourself.

The post Storey: Our Most Versatile Business Theme Yet appeared first on Themezilla.

‘Tis the season for great deals, and we are thrilled to be running one of our own. To celebrate Cyber Monday, we are offering 40% Off our Premium WordPress Themes and Memberships for 72 hours only!

So go on now, pick out your themes and enter the discount code CYBERSALE at the checkout.
Sale ends Wednesday at Midnight (PST).

Happy Shopping!

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