Author: cbmstage

WordPress has hit the Internet like a giant wave and many people use it for building attractive sites and blogs. Because WordPress is rich in resources, the combinations for wonderful sites are practically limitless. Continue on to learn more information about this great asset.

If your post has a lengthy title, make sure to adjust the permalink. For instance, a title such as “Top Ten Way To Tame Unruly Children” can create a long URL. Rather, make the permalink something along the lines of your target SEO keyphrase, such as “parental-advice-misbehaving-kids.”

When using WordPress, you can even add videos to your site. It’s worth the extra preparation. Many internet users enjoy visuals. A video is able to show people what words cannot, and that is why it’s so powerful.

Devise a schedule when you are set to begin making posts. A schedule helps you keep your eye on the deadline; so as the deadline approaches, it may give you more incentive to write that piece. You can site during a day and make posts for the entire week, and then you can schedule WordPress to post them for you.

If there is content or comments that aren’t of value, remove them. This makes your site more appealing. An excellent plugin that can aid you in removing spam from your site on a daily basis is Akismet.

You want no special characters visible within your URLs. Their presence can cause problems for the search engine spiders, so omitting them entirely is your best bet. In addition, make sure the URLs aren’t too long; you don’t want anyone to be turned off by the length.

The posts that you make appear in the order you make them, unless you specify. You have to alter the dates to alter the order of the list. You can see the date when you open up a post. Click on the date, change it and then save your post in order to change its position.

Do many people comment on posts you write? If so, going through all your comments might be tough for you and other people who are reading along. You can install a simple plugin that will put page numbers into this section. That is going to help your site seem organized, and it will be much easier to navigate.

Create the best greeting for the top of your WordPress website. This makes things a bit more personal with readers since you can make a message that shows how others found your site. Access this option using the WordPress Greet Box plugin as it helps make your visitors’ experience less impersonal.

WordPress is fun and easy to use. Once you become familiar with it, you will find it simple to develop websites that look professional. If you wish, you can learn some advanced skills to create an even better website. See how you can make your website better with WordPress tools and plugins.

A WordPress featured post section allows you to display your best content right on the home page where it’s most visible. While many premium themes include similar elements, they aren’t as functional as a featured post section.

Sure, you can always use the old standby of the “sticky post” operation to keep an entry at the top of a featured post section, but it won’t truly work as well. Using a WordPress featured post section keeps your best article at the top of the heap while still showing newer posts under it.

Why Use a WordPress Featured Post Section

Making a post sticky is a quick fix, but it only works for one particular post. Remove the sticky attribute and that post falls back in line. A featured post section will work in a more fluid, useful way than any other shortcut or trick.

The biggest problem in implementing a WordPress featured post section is that many step-by-step tutorials don’t address pagination. In other words, insert a featured post section and the “previous” and “next” links at the bottom of the page. But here’s a WordPress featured post section workaround that won’t break pagination.

How to Implement a Featured Post Section

Let’s start with the categories. Go into your dashboard and create a new category. You can name it anything you’d like, but for this lesson, we’ll name it “Featured”. Once that’s in place, move on to the code:

1) Create a loop for the platform of your featured post section using this code:

[php]
<div class="normal_posts">
< ?php
$limit = get_option(‘posts_per_page’);
query_posts(‘showposts=’ . $limit . ‘&paged=’ . $paged .’&cat=-5′); ?>
< ?php if (have_posts()) : ?>< ?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

/*** insert custom code here ***/

< ?php endwhile; endif; ?>
</div>
[/php]

2) Replace the “cat=-5” with the number corresponding to your new featured category.

[php]
<?php query_posts(‘posts_per_page=1&cat=-5’); ?>
[/php]

3) Now, go into your editor and find the pagination code. It will look something like this:

[php]
<div id="post_nav">
< ?php posts_nav_link(‘ – ‘, ‘Go Forward In Time’, ‘Go Back In Time’); ?>
</div>
[/php]

4) Now add the code below into the new featured.php file you just created:

[php]
< ?php endwhile; endif; ?>
[/php]

5) Add this to your index.php file

[php]
< ?php if(is_home() && !is_paged()): ?>
< ?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/featured.php’); ?>
< ?php endif;?>
[/php]

Basically, what we’ve done with this featured post section is create two separate, distinct loops for your WordPress site. Now, when you write a new post, you’ll have the ability to categorize it as “Featured”. When posts are assigned to this category, they will appear at the top. And all other posts created in other categories will appear below the featured post section.

If you want to learn more about the power of WordPress or have trouble setting up a featured post section, then just contact us. We’ll be happy to customize your WP site and all consultations are free!

Google, Apple and Microsoft and other companies on the web are voicing their support for HTML5.  Website developers, website designers and the like are showing off their fun tricks HTML5 can do.  Those who actually oversee HTML are telling everyone to hold their horses.  The web isn’t ready for HTML5 according to W3C.

An official from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) told reporters today, “There is a lot of excitement for HTML 5, but  it’s a little too early to deploy because we’re running into interoperability issues.” Particularly  when it comes to video content, different devices and different browsers aren’t handling HTML consistently.  We all remember Internet Explorer 6, right?  Well you can compare the problems to that situation.  As website designers, we have to ensure that the websites we develop look the same in Internet Explorer 6, IE7, IE8, FireFox and Safari…plus the few others floating around the net.

The main problem the W3C is worried about is making HTML work the same across all browsers, and right now they are not certain that is possible.  It has been years since the W3C has released a new version of HTML.  HTML4 was not released until late 1997!  So it is definitely time for an update.

HTML5 was started by the non-W3C Web Hypertext Application Technology Group in 2004.  So after even five years, it is still not ready.  The W3C says that Flash and Silverlight are going to remain the approved and viable web technologies until HTML5 is worked out.

The issues are not stopping website designers and developers, HTML is created a huge tidal wave in the internet community.  Not only has HTML5 received endorsements from the big tech companies, smaller website designers and developers who have used it are enjoying it too.

This does not mean that website designers are going to stop deploying HTML5 because the W3C says that the spec and API are still undergoing changes, and we know that the same designers who are using HTML 5 now will not likely want to develop with Flash and Silverlight for older browsers such as Internet Explorer 6 (IE6)

So for now we will see where this goes. XTELWEB always ensures that its customers receive the best type of website design available.  We also make sure that our websites work with all the internet browsers in use today.  Give us a call at 727-359-5150 to schedule a website design project for your company, product or service.  We make websites that Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Bing like!

Pinterest is a social media platform which allows users to “pin” their photos to their profile. Essentially, it’s like an online pinboard with several million users. It’s been named by Experian to be the third largest social media site on the Internet, though it has far less registered users than Facebook and Twitter.

The attraction of Pinterest is its ease-of-use and the mere fact it takes advantage of one of the biggest features of the Internet–it’s image based. In other words, it quintessentially personifies the old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Even businesses that aren’t visually based can use this growing social phenom to their advantage.

About Pinterest

Founded in March of 2010, Pinterest launched in a closed-beta phase. It later switched to an open-beta phase, but limited new users to invitation-only applications. Within just nine months of its initial launch, the network had 10,000 registered users. By the beginning of 2012, the site had nearly 12 million registered users.

The bugaboo about the social network is it has–since its inception–been seen as a personal social community, not as a business marketing tool. However, some businesses have actually been “born” on the social site, setting up small kitchen-table entrepreneurs for success.

However, despite popular belief, your business doesn’t need to be product-based in order take advantage of the benefits that Pinterest offers. —Forbes.com

The reason Pinterest has been seen by the public as a personal storyboard is in-part, because of its users. But small, medium and large businesses have leveraged the power of the site to promote their products and services. The trick is in knowing how to use the medium to build a larger audience and increase revenues.

Using Pinterest for Business

For some time, businesses have preferred using networks like Facebook and Twitter. Businesses have also harnessed the power found in YouTube marketing to promote their presence on the web. From this, a cottage industry has been born comprised of social media marketing firms. Trouble is, it can be expensive and difficult to tell the difference between the real deal and social media phonies.

Now there’s another site to deal with and it seems overwhelming to learn and maintain yet another online profile for your business. But here are some tips that will help you to use Pinterest to effectively market your business:

• Use only original photos on your boards. The profiles which are most viewed, shared, liked and photos that are most often repinned are original works. Some users get thousands of visits a day on their website through Pinterest referrals.
• Share other users’ pins. Like all social media, this site works best when users are, well, social. Sharing other users’ pins and boards widens your audience and encourages others to share yours.
• Pin catalogs to your boards. This is a great way to promote your business and get more traffic to your site. Catalogs do well on this network and companies like Nordstrom are using this strategy.
• Post offers and promotions on your boards. A good deal for other users is stumbling onto a good deal. If you offer discounts or other incentives, let the Pinterest community know about them.
• Show your business cares. Set up a board dedicated to the charities and organizations your company supports. This lets other users know your business is involved in its local community and helps to create awareness for the causes your business supports.

If you’d like to know more about social media marketing and how to use these platforms to grow your business and increase your ranking in search, then contact us. We can show you how to effectively use social media to reach more customers and leverage more sales.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site or a web page (such as a blog) from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) which may deal with paid inclusion. The theory is that the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.

 

SEO otherwise known as search engine optimization is much more than something you just add on to your site.  SEO friendly web design and development is “ground up” design.  What’s under the hood can make or break your search engine marketing efforts.  The only way to optimize every aspect of your website is to have the foresight to begin your SEO before the design and development stage by hiring a professional web design and development company as well as an SEO company.  At XTELWEB, we help companies define what search engine marketing success means before the project begins or we help facilitate an existing website by fine-tuning it for optimal search engine placement.

XTELWEB provides customized and cost effective SEO or search engine optimization, SEM or search engine marketing, SMM or social media marketing and web design & development services.  Each and every service we provide is tailor-made to each client’s individual specifications.

XTELWEB strives to be a technology partner to all of its business clients.  We offer unparalleled confidence and reliability by giving our clients the security of knowing that XTELWEB professionals will be there to answer their questions and find solutions during both times of peace and crisis.

XTELWEB’s team of trained and certified technical professionals are responsive to your business needs and requests at the same time as educating you on the latest processes and technologies that can benefit your company. We do not charge our clients for a “Professional Consultation” or “Premium Analysis” like other companies.  You will find our SEO or search engine optimization, SEM or search engine marketing, SMM or social media marketing and web design & development services much more affordable, reliable and results driven compared to other SEO companies.

The possibility of website development is both a thrilling prospect and potentially dreadful experience. This is even more so if you are inexperienced in this area. The following article will give you advice to help you create the best site.

Add a prominent tagline to your website. This tagline includes a company motto or statement that tells the reader a little bit about the business. The tagline serves to entice people to linger at your website rather than just pass through. Research shows that visitors spend roughly 8 seconds deciding if a website is worth exploring further. So make your tagline count.

Pay attention to the colors on your website to make sure they match. If the text fades into the background due to poor contrast, the text will be hard to read. Using a dark text color on a lighter background is generally easier to read than the opposite. If you are uncertain about the effectiveness of your color scheme choice, try it out on a friend and solicit feedback from them.

Learn any shortcuts that you can and try to use them. Many things have shortcuts when it comes to website development, and by taking the time to learn them, you will find faster ways of doing many different tasks. Some of these shortcuts include HTML codes that can help you quickly make changes to your web page.

Have a simple front page. Most people will decide whether or not to stay on your site just by looking at this page. make your business description specific and provide unique offerings, just keep distraction to a minimum.

Research your keywords. Though your primary focus is on supplying proper content and information to your customers, you need to build a customer base. To ensure the success of a website, there must be a good understanding of the keywords that will attract visitors to the site through search engines.

It is exciting to take on the website development that will control the flow of visitors and users for your website. What a boost to your business! This is something that can be executed well that will make a great addition to how you can promote things. Start implementing some of the tips presented above today, and you could become a successful web designer in no time at all.

Here is a list of tools that website owners should use for checking the rankings of their websites:

• dnScoop – Checks the “Value” of Website
• Quarkbase– Find out how good a website is
• AbouThiSite – Basically like QuarkBase but “lite” version
• Siterake – shows ranking in charts
• Trendrr – shows data traffic trends
• Measure Map – allows you to see what your visitors are doing
• Website Grader – check marketing effectiveness
• BuiltWith – analysis of your site
• Test My Web Hosting Speed – allows you to test speed of your host
• Web Page Analyzer – speed up your website
• urlmetrix – check popularity of site
• popuri.us – similar to urlmetrix
• FeedBurner – allows you to syndicate your blog feed
• Feed Compare – compare your site with competitors
• Compete – marketing analysis
• Alexa Rank – compare and analyze the Alexa rank of your website
• Technorati Rank – “Authority” of your blog
• PR Rank – tool for measuring google pagerank
• Whois.Net – update info about your domain name

Well I had a really nice post all written out and then what do you know? Mozilla FireFox crashed and I didn’t have the auto-save draft feature enabled into WordPress.  Anyway I just updated my Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection CS4 to the new CS5 Collection and it only set me back $899.  Not bad considering all the new features in the new CS5.  I made a video showcasing some of the Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 features that I like and I think that any web developer will appreciate.

For those that don’t know, Adobe Dreamweaver  is a tool that allows website designers to visually create and edit the components that make up a website.  With Dreamweaver you can edit a whole array of files including PHP, HTML, CSS, Java, jQuery and more! Its a great addition to any web developers toolkit!

There are plenty of new features in Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 and I will talk about the ones I like best.

Faster Web Development

The first thing I noticed is that Dreamweaver CS5 starts up significantly quicker then its predecessor. Not a really accurate measurement, but I counted CS5 starting up in seven seconds, and Dreamweaver CS4 taking nearly eleven seconds, but like I said, this is not a real accurate measurement.

Even installing Adobe CS5 was easy, and a lot faster. One feature that makes the setup process cool is the estimated installation process counter then tells you how long it will take until you start enjoying this new product.

Ensure Cross-Browser Compatibility

With Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 you can instantly see how your website looks by using a tool called Adobe BrowserLab – we wrote an article featuring this tool, among others, to check compatibility of your website across various browsers.  Currently BrowserLab works with Mozilla Firefox 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5, Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Apple Safari 3 and 4, and Google Chrome 3.

Dreamweaver Live View and Inspect Mode

Both Live View and Inspect Mode are awesome tools that once you try, you will wonder how you ever lived without!  Inspect Mode makes it easier to dicipher the various components of the box model (border, margin, padding that surround text and other HTML elements).  By turning on Inspect Mode each of the various components are rendered a different color, allowing you to see where problems are, if any.

If you combine Inspect Mode with Live View you now have a great way of viewing the layout of your site, which allows for faster fix times.  Live View gives you the option of navigating your website and the pages within your website just ask your users see it, and when you interact with different elements (images, script, links, etc) it highlights the code associated with those elements to allow for easy debugging.

There are just so many new features with Dreamweaver CS5, Adobe really kept up with the times by enabling things like CMS Integration, that will let you easily update and change sites using WordPress, Drupal or Joomla and more.  Another feature is the CSS Start page, which gives you a standard CSS layout you can start editing instantly to change the view of your site.

Speed WordPress Up: Improve Load Time

Some users will need to speed up WordPress in order to increase load performance for visitors. Over time, even the most lean themes become bogged-down as more pages and/or posts are added and visitor traffic increases. Another culprit is inefficient coding. So, it becomes necessary to speed WordPress up. These will not only improve load time for visitors, but increase search optimization elements. It also saves a bit on hosting bandwidth measurements.

Website Load Time: WordPress Speed and Response

Many websites of today utilize server-side coding, which allows HTML and CMS platforms to load faster. This is because the “serve-up” of a website resides on the server itself and visitors’ browsers don’t have to carry a heavy load. Therefore, to speed WordPress up, some configuration on the server side, if accessible, can be done. But the majority can be done within the CMS to speed up WordPress.

WARNING: The following WordPress configuration tutorial requires users to make changes in their site’s internal code. Such changes can cause serious damage to a site if not properly executed, including but not limited to: radical changes in the look, theme behaviors and search engine optimization.

Update to the Latest WordPress Version

One of the best ways to speed WordPress up is to stay up to date with the latest versions. These updates not only make your site faster, but help to keep it safe from hackers and reduce spam. Most updates come with optimization elements to speed WordPress up as well as feature updates.

Update WordPress Plugins

As with the latest version of the CMS, updating plugins helps to speed up WordPress. Outdated plugins might be code-heavy, draining precious resources. Many plugin developers not only seek to increase performance, but help to block hackers and spammers.

Delete WordPress Plugins

Unused plugins don’t serve any purpose but take up space. While deleting plugins won’t speed up WordPress to an extreme, it will shave off a significant amount dead weight. This is because plugins can use a substantial amount of code resources. Purging used ones will do quite a bit of good.

Clean Up WordPress Code

Whitespace, internal scripts and long CSS all take up unnecessary space. To speed WordPress up, site owners can eliminate somethings, use external code and use shorthand CSS. This is a great way to really speed up WordPress and significantly increase website load time.

Whitespace

Whitespace is everywhere in WordPress. Indented tabs and line breaks are included for organization. But they’re not completely necessary. For instance, change code like this:

[php]
<?php
add_action(‘wp_footer’, ‘add_googleanalytics’);
function add_googleanalytics() { ?>
// Paste your Google Analytics code from Step 6 here
<?php }
To this:
<?php add_action(‘wp_footer’, ‘add_googleanalytics’); function add_googleanalytics() { ?>; // Paste your Google Analytics code from Step 6 here <?php } ?>
[/php]

External Scripts

Way too much can be placed in the header and elsewhere. So use external scripts to speed WordPress up. It’s better to use external sources like this:
< ?script type=”text/javascript” src=”someexamplehere.js”></script

Shorthand CSS

Change long, drawn-out CSS code from this:

[css]
.test {margin-top: 9px; margin-right: 2px; margin-bottom: 7px; margin-left: 4px;}
[/css]

To shorthand CSS like this:

[css]
.test {margin: 9px 2px 7px 4px;}
[/css]

If your WordPress site has become slow, then contact us for a free, expert consultation to speed up WordPress and get your site to optimum performance. We’ll discuss various issues which might be affecting your website load time.

SEO isn’t always easy; in fact, it can be quite a complicated topic. It requires both patience and knowledge. Start with this excellent article to understand how to get the most from SEO.

Be certain that your website is well-coded when you are working on optimizing it for search engines. Poorly coded java can make it difficult for spiders to index your pages. In addition, you won’t be indexed if you have Flash included without a description written out.

Do not fall into thniking advertising can boost your ranking for search engines. Placing ads on other sites could drive visitors to yours, but it won’t boost rankings.

Search Engines

Help search engines find you easily and you will rise in the ranks. Search engines are constantly crawling your site, going through all of your content looking for related terms that tell them what your site is about, and you can make it easier for them to do so. Create a site map, which helps spiders to understand which parts of your site are the most important.

Mostly, your site is supposed to entertain visitors and keep them clicking about. A big part of SEO is actually getting people to not only come back to your site time and again, but also spend extended amounts of time on your pages. Focusing on these sort of things will help to improve your ranking.

Get a domain name that’s both memorable and relevant to your services or products. This is helpful for people who learn about your site from places like Youtube. A simple, catchy name will be easy to recall.

You should sell yourself to others as a specialist in your field. This is a great Internet tool. Focus your products and services on a very specific segment of the market, then utilize search engine optimization so that those buyers will be able to find your site on the internet. Provide the customers with what they desire, not what they may think that they desire.

You can get a little more SEO performance by taking your website into the blogging world. Start a blog of your own, and get involved with other blogs that cover related topics. The algorithms used by search engines are particularly favorable towards blogs. Blogs are consistently updated and have structured data, both things algorithms like. Your backlinks are key to increasing your search engine rankings.

Even though a link exchange is possible, it is a better idea to exchange articles with other webmasters to boost rankings. This basically means that you will use an article created by a different website owner, and post it on your website. You will then need to credit the author with the help of a link to their site, and they will do the same for you on their site. This type of SEO has more success than traditional link exchanges do.

Avoid duplicating content if you don’t want your content considered spam. Duplicate content can occur without you even realizing it. You might think you’re saving time by using a certain product description over again, but this is going to be viewed a different way by search engines.

Do not include a multitude of keywords in a short space on your page. Choose around 12 keywords that focus on what the bulk of your website is all about. Analytical tools are great for determining which words work the best.

In conclusion, you learned not only some basics about search engine optimization but also some specific ways in which your can apply it to your own website. Use the information from this article to optimize your website.