So, why responsive web design matters for your website? Here are some important reasons for this tricky question.

No need to maintain different pages for different platforms

Responsive design doesn’t require you to set up different pages for different devices. Almost every user these days would prefer a mobile version of their websites, so would you start designing one for blackberry users? Another for laptop users and may be in a couple of years you will have to design for a number of additional new devices. It’s really difficult to keep with the endless new resolutions and devices. Sometimes you may forget considering some resolutions or devices and design for the ones you can. You are more likely to lose traffic and customers from such mistakes. This is where responsive design comes in.

Respond to user’s environment

Responsive designs neatly respond to a user’s environment. No matter the device your user has, make sure to offer a better experience to them. Although smartphones are equipped with features that help to zoom and browse, navigation and clarity may not be good. You may come across such problems while filling out forms or trying to shop through an online store. You may become frustrated by the clumsy process and may end up with increase in bounce rates. Since all these devices mainly differ in their screen resolutions, responsive designs are compatible across all widths on which they are being viewed.

Less cost and time

Designers are under the wrong assumption that using a responsive web design is an expensive activity. Though the design startup requires some investment, several instances suggest that the cost gets balanced by the savings earned on multiplying the design efforts for multiple platforms. Also, large themes needs more time to extract all additional files and of course even a few seconds add up. The end user may finally get frustrated from waiting as such site is inefficient in loading those files. This increases the loading time of your page and thus has a bad impact on your bounce rate, search engine rankings and income. Moreover, using responsive web design makes your website survive for a long time.

Improves SEO

Instead of getting backlinks and traffic to each and every site, responsive web design encourages you to focus all your SEO efforts in one place which means all link juice is directed to the same domain with no site-slowing effects.

Google too recommends responsive design, so you can bet that it improves SEO. Plus, any backlinks that you gain are directed to one domain and that way your sites have better rankings on search engine results.

Publish content only once

Maintaining a website can be hard enough at times, but what would happen if you have multiple websites or apps for different platforms? It becomes even more time consuming. As responsive designs rely on a single site with different layouts, the maintenance of your domain is streamlined. This means you need to publish your post once so you do not worry about duplicate post and search engine penalty. It’s easy to update your post once and the change will reflect across all devices instantly and offers better ROI.

Available to every visitor

With responsive design you website can be accessed by every visitor no matter the device they are using. You may lose a considerable amount of traffic if your website does not support different platforms, but with responsive design you can avoid this and reach a large audience.

Responsive web design when implemented the right way, outweighs the disadvantages and if you are working towards designing a new website it is something that you should not ignore.

Ever wanted to set up a network of eCommerce sites and gain commission off of each sub site? Like Etsy?

Now you can.

Thanks to MarketPress from WPMU DEV!

The general rule of thumb is having a load time of 2-3 seconds.

Here’s a list of quick tips on how to speed up your WordPress site.

1. Use a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache.
2. Use as few CSS files, Javascript files, and images as possible.
3. Compress your CSS and JS files.
4. If you can do it with CSS rather than an image, do it.
5. Call your CSS at the “top” of the site and your JS at the bottom.
6. Don’t use flash.
7. Use a quality web host.
8. If you can afford it, have a dedicated server instead of shared hosting.
9. Remove spam comments.
10. Use as few WordPress plugins as possible. Figure out which plugins are slowing down your site, and deactivate them or use alternatives.
11. Compress your images. Apps like ImageOptim can compress your images without sacrificing the quality. In my personal experience I experience a 25% reduction in file size.
12. Use a quality theme. May seem ambiguous or basic, but a well coded theme can make a huge difference in your site’s load time.
13. Use sprites to reduce the number of files loaded, speeding up your site.
14. Use a CDN like Amazon CloudFront or Max CDN.
15. Don’t use inline CSS.
16. Have a favicon.
17. Use a trailing slash on your urls. For example, don’t use http://yourdomain.com, instead use http://yourdomain.com/ – unless there’s a file extension, naturally.
18. Use gzip. Many web hosts do this automatically, but if it doesn’t, check out the WP HTTP Compression plugin.
19. Minimize redirects, be they meta, 301, or otherwise.
20. Specify a character set.
21. Specify image dimensions.
22. Don’t have images larger than they appear on the site. If an image on the site displays as 100px wide, don’t have the actual image 200px wide. The larger image takes longer to load and increases the processing demand on your browser.
23. Reduce cookie size. More info.
24. Try and keep your components smaller than 25k.
25. Optimize your database. A plugin like WP-DBManager can make a difference.
26. Use the latest version of WordPress. WordPress is constantly optimized, so likely a simple update will make your WordPress site faster, and more secure at that.
27. Use Feedburner.
28. Use Lazy Load to only load images that are actually viewed.
29. Use excerpts.
30. Limit the number of post revisions stored. Revision Control can do that for you.
31. Turn off pingbacks and trackbacks.
32. Replace PHP with static HTML when possible.

Give them a go and see how much you can speed up your WordPress website!

How to Find a Backdoor in a Hacked WordPress Site and Fix It – sometimes scumbag developers will work in backdoors into their free themes and plugins so they can gain access to your site. Find them, and get rid of them.

Web Design

4 Key Steps to Improving Typography On Your Blog – Good typography is key in ensuring good usability. Good usability is key in retaining visitors. So I’m sure you see the importance of good Typography.

The 3 Step Guide to Creating Pinterest-friendly Graphics for Your Blog

WordPress Themes

30 New WordPress Themes for Your Creative Portfolio Website

40 Premium WordPress Business& Corporate Themes Part 5

WordPress Plugins

How to Display Your Google+ Picture in Search Results with WordPress

Add Beautiful Instagram Image Galleries to WordPress

Be sure to check in next month for the best in WordPress for January.

Also be sure to check out Best in WordPress for November.

The CMS, or Content Management System, got popularized in early 90’s when we started making dynamic websites where content was needed to updated more regularly and no more a process of sending it to tech guy for html codes made sense.

I won’t bore you with the history of features of CMS and their development. They all progressed with the need of the publishers and changing content types, and today we have some powerful and flexible CMSes as per the need of the publisher.

WordPress came in 2003 when Web2.0 was taking its shape and more and more users were going for their own sites and blogs.  WordPress made it open, free and fun to start your own blog.  We can even see the importance of WordPress in popularizing the hosted websites, which before it was still restricted to those having or affording a tech guy. 

But after advent of social networks and particularly twitter and facebook, which has  reached 1/7th of human population, the blogs have lost their charm. No more to have an online presence you need your own website.  Facebook pages, Twitter Status updates almost serve the purpose of 80 per cent who currently go for their own blogs, though they may not be able to have the ego satisfying own name domain with facebook pages. Though I am sure facebook in the need of revenue for shareholders and trying to kick Google will also open such a service, but that is a topic of another blog post.

So why I believe that WordPress should be doomed? Because the features it provide currently is already available through Facebook and twitter, and few will be made in future.  No more one needs to have their own domain name and even spend 50-100 $ yearly in domain registration and hosting.

Now coming to my second part that why WordPress isn’t doomed.

WordPress may not be going to useful for casual users in future.  But what WordPress has already achieved is that it has taught thousands, if not millions, of users about CMS. Today in times of dwindling revenue for Media Houses, it is no more feasible for them to continue with the tech team budget of hundred thousands of dollars annually. They all are looking for better and cost effective manner to utilize their resources across different publications.

WordPress with its open platform not only developed users, but also a community of developers who have built plugin for it as per different needs. Though with its regular and numerous updates it gets annoying for many features but still finding a plugin as per one need is highly probable on WordPress due to number of users.

As my premise is that WordPress going to be more effective as editorial publication CMS than a tool just to have a site with writing your daily chatter, let me show you have few sources showing rise of WordPress from CMS to editorial CMS:

Most of the college editorial publications are on or getting on WordPress, WordPress has developed plugins giving it multisite features, one admin for multiple sites, editorial newsroom giving you power to manage your as big editorial team and across various publications with power planning and user management. 

Image Source:  A working editorial newsroom for WordPress sites via Betaout.com

We know that even after having more than 100 million websites hosting the wordpress.com as a business organization just make 10-12 million USD yearly.

I believe it is the open source community and developers who will develop WordPress for the changing times, which is going to keep WordPress alive for good amount of time. And maybe even Media houses will able to bring their house in order with it a bit so that we all won’t be forced to rely on news source’s copying and rephrasing. 

Your WordPress Disaster Recovery Plan – What to do if the worst should happen and you lose your website.

Web Design

10 useful typography tips to improve your website readability – A website’s readability is an often overlooked, yet extremely important, consideration for your website. Here’s some quick and easy ways to improve your website’s readability.

WordPress Themes

Theme Shaker – quickly and easily find WordPress themes across all theme marketplaces

Guide To WordPress Coding Standards – Work with WordPress? Here’s some excellent guidelines to improve the quality of your WordPress themes – make them easier to code, maintain, and collaborate on.

WordPress Plugins

Ultimate Branding WordPress Plugin – Ultimate Branding allows you to easily white-label the entire WordPress admin area, from the admin bar, to the dashboard and a whole lot more besides.

WordPress Plugin Development Strategies – Looking to get into WordPress plugin development?

From the Archives

3 Ways to Let Visitors Submit Guest Posts – Want to get increased visitor participation? Here’s some quick ways to allow visitors to easily submit guest posts.

Mobile: The Growing Behemoth that Cannot be Ignored (Part 1 of 2) – Nonetheless, mobile is a growing component of the web that must be adressed by all responsible web professionals.

Be sure to check in next month for the best in WordPress for December.

Nonetheless, this is a growing component of the web that must be adressed by all responsible web professionals.

More and more people are browsing more and more, often even exclusively, on mobile devices. I know several people that only browse the web on their iPad and iPhone. And they aren’t the only ones. Here’s some stats for you.

• 31% of American adults use their phones for the majority of their internet access. (source)
• 42% of UK adults that own a smartphone now say that device is the most important device for accessing the Internet. (source)
• Worldwide, 25% of mobile web users only use mobile web or very rarely use desktop websites. (source)
• 102 million people access Facebook solely from mobile in June – a 23% increase over mobile users in March. (source)
• 70% of Pandora’s traffic came from mobile devices in March 2012. (source)
• The Weather Channel registered 1.1 billion page views via desktop and 1.3 billion page views via mobile. (source)
• In February 2012, 46% of adults in America use smartphones. (source) By now likely over half of all Americans use smartphones.
• More crazy mobile statistics

Soon, Mobile Users will Pass Desktop Users

It is predicted that by early 2014 more people will be using mobile devices than desktop devices. (source)

At the rate that mobile usage is growing, it is irresponsible for web developers and designers to ignore mobile devices. It is our job to provide our clients and customers the best browsing experience possible. How can we call ourselves web designers if we do our clients a disservice by providing them with a non-optimal website? We must rise and live up to our duty! We must rise and stive to be the best we can! We must rise! Men of the West!

Ahem. Sorry. Got a little carried away there.

That all being said, as web professionals, we must consider how our devices look on tablets and smartphones. tl;dr I guess.

The Best Way to Deliver Said Optimal Experience

So here I go… on and on about the importans of delivering an optimal experience for mobile devices. However, I’m not quite ready to give away the punch line yet. Although probably all of you know where I’m going anyways. Even so, I’m going to go into optimal experiences for all devices next week in Part 2: Delivering an Optimal Experience for All Devices. Give us a follow on Twitter or Facebook

Just about every business out there is offering discounts, so why not join in?

Until Monday Evening wpLifeGuard Membership will be only $19!

Our lifetime membership is normally $29 – get it now for $10 off, that’s a 35% discount!

Learn to use WordPress with all 39 of our WordPress video tutorials covering all areas of the WordPress dashboard. What’s more, we keep out videos up to date with the latest version of WordPress!

This discount is a limited time offer. Sign up before Monday evening on November 26th!

Get Access Now!

ThemeShift is an excellent WordPress Marketplace with a consistant polished style. If you’re looking to acquire a WordPress theme with a clean, minimalist, professional style, then ThemeShift is for you. They have 18 excellent WordPress themes that fit a variety of needs.

We have the privilege of giving away six excellent WordPress Themes from ThemeShift to our readers. It’s rather simple. We’ll be giving away one ThemeShift WordPress theme each week for the next six weeks.

The Prizes

1. Business WordPress Theme: deCanto
2. Real Estate WordPress Theme: deCorum
3. News Magazine WordPress Theme: deFacto
4. Portfolio WordPress Theme: deFolio
5. Portfolio WordPress Theme: deLucide
6. Business WordPress Theme: deCanto

How to Enter to Win

There are several ways to enter. The best way to enter is tweeting about the giveaway once a week – this’ll give you an entry each week for a total of 6 chances to win.

Tweet

You can also subscribe to our email newsletter, like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or Circle us on Google+.

If you enter to win by subscribing, we’ll need you to contact us so we can verify that you’ve entered. We’ll only use your email address for verification purposes and to give you your prize. If you liked us on one of the three social networks we’ll need your corresponding username or URL to verify.

To verify your information for entering, submit it here.

This Week’s Theme: deFolio

Portfolio WordPress Theme deFolio

deFolio is a perfect WordPress theme for anyone looking to show off their work in a clean and professional manner. With features like a jQuery image slider, multiple layout options, custom menus, custom widgets, custom post types, shortcodes, and more, this theme is a fantastic jumpstart for anyone looking to build their presence online.

Don’t know how to install WordPress themes? Check out our WordPress video tutorial showing how to use WordPress themes

At the last count the latest version of WordPress, the world’s most popular blogging tool, had been downloaded 65 million times. That is roughly the population of France. It is quite popular then. WordPress that is, not France; obviously.

A search for ‘Wordpress Themes’ brings up around 112,000,000 hits online. Themes are the driving force of the whole WordPress infrastructure. They set the look, feel and overall style of a blog. But WordPress is now much more than a blog, it is a deep open-source content management system (CMS) used by almost 17 percent of Alexa Internet’s ‘Top One Million websites’ and 22 percent of all new websites.

There is a whole online industry vying for attention in the WordPress Themes sector millions of dollars of revenue a month being earned from themes which designers create and sell. This is all great if you are starting out with a new blog or corporate website online. Or is it? Well the problem is that there is so much choice, fragmented across so many sites, with many themes full of malicious or encrypted code, that it is almost impossible to find what you are really looking for.

How do you sort the wheat from the chaff? Which site can really deliver a shopping cart and fully managed forum without slowing your site down to a crawl?

Enter the Solution

A new site has just launched which claims to break through the clutter and hit you with that dream design in seconds … milli-seconds in fact.

Theme Shaker has been in development for six months. It aims to pull together all of the greatest WordPress Themes on the net and filter them through a lightening quick search facility. Let’s check how it works.

The first thing you will notice is a stylish array of colorful themes on the home page. The initial feel is that the site is comprehensive while not looking cluttered. Robust, but not intimidating.

We could click straight through onto a theme which might fulfill the requirements, or there is simple fast search facilities right the top of the page. But, how can we really dig deep, add our most specific requirements and truly get a search result filtered down to exactly what we need?

Well, this is the cool things about Theme Shaker. The main search facility is hidden away behind the header with a cool tab teasing you in with a hand-written ‘open’ leading the way to the ‘Shake it’ tab. Once opened you really get to the heart of the site.

Click the Business category and before you can even start to read through the rest of the options the main page is working away reducing the themes. Let’s move to the layouts tab next which shows a simple graphical representation of the design you can expect. From one column, left side bar, right side bar, multiple side bars – it is all there. As we click, ‘one column’ the algorithms kick in again and the themes reduce once more.

We add ‘Minimalist’ to our search and we are down to one page. Once ‘Responsive Design’ is included from the features tab we are already down to 9 stylish themes staring back at us. We have been on the site 73 seconds. Impressive.

So, what are the suggested themes actually like? You don’t even need to click on them to find out! Hover the cursor over the theme that catches your eye and up pops a window with a larger picture. The thumbnail turns grey and gives you the headline details.

Click through and the information really comes on strong. A clear image, a detailed description of what to expect if you ran your blog through this selection and a sliding menu at the bottom with similar themes all appear in a clean and simple way.

Theme Shaker is a welcome addition to the 112 million WordPress theme sites. It is the Google for WordPress, smart, intuitive and damn quick. It will certainly help new bloggers to filter through the fog and find something unique and stylish with which to launch their online communication to the world.

But the site will also be a big help to more advanced WordPressers and graphic designers looking for a tool to help them discover new themes for their clients.

There may be 65 million people with WordPress 3.0 downloaded onto their servers, but how many really love the theme that they are currently running? There are also 65 million people in France, and you wouldn’t want all of them cooking you dinner every night! To find a top chef you have to go to a top restaurant – to find a top WordPress site you have to go to Theme Shaker!

Visit Theme Shaker