How to Create a Mobile Version of Your WordPress Site
23SHARESFacebookTwitter Contrary to popular belief, there is no point in producing a separate version of your website – from scratch – just for mobile, because you can simply incorporate a responsive design instead. What is a responsive design exactly? It’s a web design technique that scales the site, layout and content appropriately to match the screen resolution of the device users are browsing on. This means that it doesn’t matter whether visitors are looking at your site with a desktop, mobile or tablet – the site will automatically scale to fit. For example, you can see that this blog has responsive design enabled because, if you adjust your browser window to a smaller size, everything in the blog resizes to fit the new window. Note the lack of a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the window – that means that everything on the blog has been reformatted to fit the window perfectly. So, how can you create a responsive, mobile WordPress site? For the most part, any web designer can implement a responsive design but it does take a bit of extra time and effort. That’s one reason why WordPress is so fantastic. All of that extra work can be eliminated – and additional functionality can be unlocked – by installing a responsive theme or plugin. If you’re looking to improve your WordPress-powered mobile website then plugins offer the easiest way to do that. Sorting through the massive catalog of plugins for WordPress can be daunting, to say the least. Not to mention the fact that there are usually several variants of the same plugin type, just adding to the general confusion. To make things easier, I’ve compiled a list of plugins that will help you achieve that excellent mobile site you’ve been wanting. 1. Duda Mobile Website Builder With Duda Mobile Website Builder, you can have a mobile version of your site up and running in no time. It works like a visual editor, allowing you to edit the layout of your mobile site with drag-and-drop mechanics. It’s easy to use, and it does a pretty good job of converting your regular site into a mobile one for you automatically. That being said, you can further customize aspects of the site so that they are to your liking. Of course, the plugin also makes the following features available for your mobile site: Click-to-Call Mobile Maps Business Hours Yelp Reviews Image Slider Photo Gallery Embed Videos Facebook Like Button Social Icons It’s worth noting that you don’t have to incorporate or use all of the features listed, but they are available if you decide you need them....
Google Taking Action Against Guest Posting Blogs
12SHARESFacebookTwitter I’m not sure if these are isolated incidents or Google just being Google, but I’ve received messages from 5 different webmasters that have stated they have received a site-wide penalisation for “Unnatural outbound links”. These are predominantly from bloggers that have excessively used guest blogging as a way to gather a constant stream of articles on their blogs. It’s interesting actually because Google has ramped up its assault on guest blogging in general, with Matt Cutts’ recent blog post on the “decay of guest blogging” hitting the industry succinctly last month. This is the message they’ve received in Google Webmaster Tools: Example.com/ : Unnatural outbound links Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links on this site. Selling links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. As a result of unnatural links from your site, Google has applied a manual spam action to example.com. There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site. What have I advised them to do? The 5 websites that I mentioned at the beginning of this article have all lost their toolbar PageRank, as a result of this. I’ve advised them to actually nofollow or either remove outgoing links on their blogs and to not accept further guest posts until they have sorted out the mess they are now in. Most of them use WordPress, and I’ve recommended an amazing free WordPress plugin that will do the job fairly easily for them. It’s called Outbound Link Manager, a WordPress Plugin that identifies all the external links on your website and allows you to either remove or nofollow them. I recently used this tool on a blog that I purchased and found that the blog was plagued with external links that had no relevancy to the blog’s topic, so I simply nofollow’d and removed quite a few of those links doing this with the help of the aforementioned WordPress plugin. What can you do to avoid getting in this sort of trouble? Stop accepting guest posts en-masse. I carefully vet any guest post article that goes on this blog. In fact, I’ve only allowed two guest posts on here, as a result of over 100 people contacting me to guest post on here. What people don’t seem to realise is that I actually read what they are writing about to see if what they are writing about actually has any real value or is just another rehashed version of what they’ve written before. (Thank you, Google exact match phrase search option) You just need to be more careful with who you allow to guest...
What new features does WordPress 3.8 give us?
13SHARESFacebookTwitter Crowned as the “most beautiful WordPress yet”, what exactly does this new version give us aside from a new fancy user interface? From first glance, and from not even reading the full list of feature updates, I can already see that they’ve made this version of WordPress very tablet friendly. You only to have to login to WordPress via tablet or minimise your browser to see that it will respond (responsive design) to whatever resolution you’re working in. See this as an example: As you can see, the text is replaced by those larger icons – so that it fits quite comfortably when you’re browsing the WordPress 3.8 admin control centre. You’ll also notice that from a design perspective, things have become much darker on the menu side of things. The default colours have changed from white to black. I personally love this change, as it gives the WordPress 3.8 admin area that sleek feel and the white text behind a black ground makes it easy on the eyes. On that note, you can change the colour schemes in the admin control centre with a colour picker that WordPress have incorporated into the latest build: You’ll notice that most of this review has been focused on the design aspects of WordPress 3.8. This is because the 3.8 is all about updating the user interface to give it that sleek and sexy look. To addon to this sentiment, WordPress have also released a new theme called “Twenty Fourteen”. It’s a magazine based theme and it looks quite sleek, although I’ve found that it would require a lot of tweaking to make it look like the image WordPress has given us: There’s not too much that I can delve into when it comes to features, as this 3.8 update seems to have been all about design. As always, the WordPress team have delivered a fantastic result and I feel they’ve added enough features, that another feature update would be somewhat...
Related Posts WordPress Plugins for your blog
12SHARESFacebookTwitter There are a few plugins that will help you to integrate related posts into your blog. These are good because they show the readers what other posts you have written, and are very good for keeping people on your website. If you can keep people on your website and looking at your blog posts then they are more likely to gain a liking for your website and want to return at a later date. You may even convince them to sign up for your RSS feed so that they become fond weekly readers. Here are a few you may like to try. Related Posts by Category http://wordpress.org/plugins/related-posts-by-category/ This is a tool that allows you to link your posts by what other posts are in the same category. In this way it automates the process and is only as successful as your categorizing skills. For example, if you are putting unrelated nonsense into your categories, then unrelated nonsense is all that is going to appear in your related content/ suggestion section. If you are very conscientious about your categories then a reasonably good range should appear in your suggested content/related content section. Shareaholic http://wordpress.org/plugins/sexybookmarks/ This is a plugin that will add a social bookmarking menu to your posts. It may also add a related content widget to your blog post, its pages, its index, or all of them. There are at least two million people who have tried this plugin so it must have something going for it. Related Links http://wordpress.org/plugins/related-links/ You may use this plugin to manually link up your posts in a very easy-to-do and simple manner if you wish. You can link up your posts in a way that makes jumping from one to the other a step of intuition. You can link to pages if you want, or you can link to certain posts. It means you are able to link one or two to your categories, and then add a few other links to specific posts. You can use custom URLs, and you can even pick external pages to link to too. Related Posts for WordPress http://wordpress.org/plugins/microkids-related-posts/ Use this plugin to manually select your posts that you want displaying as recommended/suggested or related content. You can use the widget or you can use the shortcode. Related Posts by Zemanta http://wordpress.org/plugins/related-posts-by-zemanta/ This is one of those plugins that also works on their own network. You can suggest posts on your blog and on their Zemanta’s websites. You have to hand pick the ones that you want to use on their websites. As a standalone suggestion tool it is not too bad. ELI’s Related Posts Footer...
“Not found” issue with WordPress
12SHARESFacebookTwitter I recently started a few new blogs and I used an automated installer to install WordPress via cPanel. However, when I created the site I noticed a few issues had arisen and that had made it impossible for me to login to “wp-admin” and “wp-login.php”, so I wondered what could have gone wrong, as every time when I tried to access those URLs, I encountered “Not found”, even though the directory does indeed exist. I knew it was a .htaccess issue, so I looked at one of my older blogs where I have none of these issues and copied my .htaccess file into the directory of my new site. I copied this .htaccess: # BEGIN WordPress <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^index.php$ – [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] </IfModule> # END WordPress … into my blog’s new directory and the problem was fixed. If you have this problem then this is most likely the...
WordPress’ Photon – Slow
5SHARESFacebookTwitter WordPress’ Photon – Slow WordPress has a content delivery network called “Photon” and what this content delivery does in WordPress’ own words: Give your site a boost by loading images in posts from the WordPress.com content delivery network. We cache your images and serve them from our super-fast network, reducing the burden on your Web host with the click of a button. I’m not sure what the issue is. However, on the site that is having the issue with Jetpack’s Photon module, well, it only has 600+ images and that’s including generated thumbnails. So, I’m really not sure what the problem is. Also, after scouring Google to find out if others are having issues, I found results suggesting that I was not alone. From what I gathered the WordPress staff or people who’ve worked on WordPress plugins were saying the issues could range from a wide variety of issues. It could be that my site has another plugin which is conflicting with the Photon module, it could be that the design of my website is not compatible with Photon, or it could be that my images are too large. It could be anything essentially, which doesn’t really help. So for now, I’ve disabled it until I can find or come up with a...
Recent From Search
-
![Can I rank for the term [Jonathan Jones]?](https://vlexo.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/MrJonathanJones-321x214.png)
Can I rank for the term [Jonathan Jones]? Dec 22, 2018 -
-
-
-
Top Posts & Pages
