6 Best WP Plugins That Can Help You Create a Cost-effective WordPress Blog

If you are looking for a platform that can help generate great revenue with blogs, indubitably, WordPress proves to be a viable choice. However, to reap the benefits of this open-source content management system, one needs to work strategically and seek some expert guidance.

Just creating a WordPress blogging site won't be sufficient for earning money, one needs to pull their sleeves up and work with absolute precision to achieve their ultimate goal. There are several ways that can help you create revenues with a blog, for instance, you can sell products, make sponsored posts, monetize it, optimize it and advertise products on your blog page.

Fortunately, there are myriad of WordPress plugins that can rescue you from the situation and can help you promote your blog with ease. The WP plugins are easy to install and activate, and facilitate users to conveniently introduce desired features in their WP site. And, this is one of the major reasons why people are converting their existing HTML site into WordPress; one can easily enhance their online presence by following this migration. This big switch can lend an easy-to-handle site with superior functionalities and astounding features.

Here are some best WP plugins that help advertise better on the blog.

1.) WP Easy Allopass: You can incorporate allopass payment solution on your WP site via this plugin. It is similar to the PayPal, Google Checkout or other secure and popular payment gateways that are available in the market. This plugin allows one to sell an extensive number of products (digital products) and facilitates the visitors to directly make payments from your site itself (that is, it doesn't redirect to another page for processing transactions).

2.) AdPress: This is an ideal plugin for those who have extensive traffic on their WP site. It features an automated Ad selling system that helps manage ad place on the page via certain simple settings including, the duration for which the ad will be displayed on your site and charges on the basis of ad space required. With this plugin, you can allow the visitors to buy the ad space on your site as per their requirements; it even facilitates visitors to access secured PayPal account for making online payments, thus, you will not require an additional plugin for the same.

3.) WP-Insert: With this efficient plugin, you will be able to effortlessly monetize your site and add advertisements on it. Moreover, it will also facilitate you with some incredible tracking services like Google Analytics and a lot more, which are just perfect for managing a WP site.

4.) AdInjection: It will help you attract potential traffic and easily manage ad spaces on your site. You can use this feature-rich plugin to precisely inject ads on the blogging page. And since, It supports with various types of ads, it will utilize the available space in an optimized fashion, and thus, will give you a great opportunity to earn money.

5.) WP Pro Advertising System: You can professionally manage all the ads on your blog without even spending a single penny. This plugin offers great features that will allow you to instantly and conveniently handle the advertisements. Some of its features are click stats, CTR, etc.

6.) AdRotate: This free plugin allows one to add advertisements on their site and shuffle them by interchanging their positions. You can also personalize the settings and restrict the visibility of certain ads to a specific group of people. Thus, you can display any country-specific ads for the readers from that particular country. And, it can facilitate one to easily monetize their site.

Wrapping Up:
You can use the above mentioned feature-rich plugins to enhance your WP blog and conveniently display advertisements on the blogs to generate higher revenue.

A Definitive guideline on Designing & Building a WordPress Theme

WordPress is undoubtedly one of the most sought-after content management systems(CMSs) used by web developers across the globe. If building a new website is on your mind then choosing WordPress can turn to be your best made decision. Although WordPress renders you the freedom of choosing a suitable theme for your site, there are individuals who opt for building their own custom WordPress theme. If you too are inclined to build a WordPress theme from scratch, this is a blog you'll definitely love to read. Here, I've explained the step-by-step process of designing and building a WordPress theme.

Paying attention to the theme designing part is essential

By using Photoshop for your mockups, you can easily choose to design the theme's homepage first after laying a specific type of grid. This grid is usually 960 pixels wide and can be downloaded from a range of websites offering free pre-made grids. After having designed the homepage, you'll need to design a single page view followed by designing the category/archive page. If you plan to include special features such as custom galleries and post-types, you also need to design the same. For doing all this, you can build up a folder that's full of UI kits and other tids and bits that can be re-used during the designing process. These kits can well be utilized for creating an array of social media logos and icons.

Laying the groundwork is crucial

According to a recent research it has been found that clients aren't bothered as to how beautiful a site looks, the thing they're concerned about is what type of results are puring in once the site is fully-functional. As one of the most crucial steps in WordPress theme designing, you need to understand what the client is seeking for via his/her website. This particular information will help you build a theme that revolves around the entire site. Some of the most important goals for a website include: generating leads, improving brand awareness, selling a product etc.

Understanding WordPress theme's anatomy is mandatory

In case for the option of any reliable PSD to Wordpress Conversion Services, after designing the theme's home page and inner pages, its time for you to save the images including icons, logos, background images etc. as .png files. Have a look at any pre-built WordPress theme and you'll notice that it contains around 12 core files. While a majority of default WordPress themes included more files requiring extra customization, these additions aren't necessary everytime. Here's a list of main files that you'll be working with during the theme building process:

    index.php- this is the core file that acts as the homepage

    header.php- this file contains everything that you want to get displayed at top of your site

    sidebar.php- this file contains everything you'd want to appear within a sidebar

    archive.php- this is the file used for viewing categories, dates, posts by author and other vital assets of the website

    footer.php- this file contains everything that you want to showcase towards the bottom of your site.

    Comments.php- this is the file called at the bottom of the single.php file for enabling the comments section.

    Single.php- this file is used for viewing each individual post

    Page.php- The purpose of this file is similar to single.php with only one difference that it is being used for WordPress web pages

    Search.php- this file is used for displaying the search results.

    404.php- this file is used for displaying the 404 errors

    functions.php- this is the file that is used for configuring the WordPress core, without the need for editing core files

    style.css- this file is used for performing all the styling for the WordPress theme.

Next is converting HTML and CSS into a WordPress theme





Now that the original design is getting trasnformed into a code, its time for you to convert the static HTML and CSS into a WordPress theme. You can do this by simply creating a folder for the theme, followed by creating the php files as already explained above. Since all the details of the WordPress theme are contained within the stylesheet, you need to configure the same. For this, you just need to add the below code and amend the details:

/*
Theme Name: Sticky
Theme URI: http://www.blog.spoongraphics.co.uk
Description: Sticky WordPress theme
Version: 1
Author: Chris Spooner
Author URI: http://www.spoongraphics.co.uk
*/

In addition to above, you also need to ensure that the background image paths are defined correctly in your CSS properties.

Next in-line is the step of configuring the comments template

It is recommended to copy the comments template from the default WordPress theme for making any changes. This is simply because the default theme contains some key lines of WordPress code. With a handy comments file, you can use the same for a variety of forthcoming WordPress theme development projects.

Completing with the search and 404 error page building process

At such a platform of CMS conversions, search feature is pretty much a copy of the archive.php file. Here, you simply need to include a link <?php the_search_query() ?> which will display the user's search term as the title. Talking about the 404 error page, you can simply choose to configure the template for displaying the error information. All you need to do is simply include the usual get_header() ;, get_footer(); tags wherever required.

Conclusion
Now those were the steps that make up for the design and development of a WordPress theme. Hope you'd have found the blog interesting. Do share your views/opinions using the comments box below.


Also Read: Testing Your Wordpress Theme to Avert a Major Screw Up

Opting Hand-coded PSD to Wordpress Conversion: Why it is beneficial?

 

A content management system such as WordPress, has become the most sought-after choice of site owners, as it helps them manage their website with ease. It offers tons of flamboyant features that enables site owners to enhance their site's functional ability.

No doubt, WordPress comes up with all the required ingredients that can help introduce incredibly amazing features and functionalities in your website. However, since the needs of customers keeps on changing incessantly and new WordPress updates are released frequently, it becomes imperative to keep your site in-tune with latest market trends and the new releases.

Wondering how?

You can opt for PSD to Wordpress Theme conversion platform to add new-found features in your site and make it work in accordance with new version updates. The conversion can be performed using two methods. You can either choose to auto-generate code by using some automated conversion software. The second way is to carry out the transformation manually, by coding your PSD files by hand. This will eventually help you acquire a better understanding of web designing skills and probably help you become a better web designer. Hand-coding PSD to WordPress offers several benefits, such as:

Helps Locate Bugs Easily.

Writing code yourself, instead of making some software do it for you will help you understand your code in a better way. Since, you will know every little detail about your code, it will become easy for you to identify and fix the bugs. However, auto-generated codes are usually difficult to understand and often contains bugs.

Also Read: A Noteworthy Guide for Launching a Self Hosted Wordpress Site


Greater control.

Using some software to write codes don't give you much control over making changes to the code later. However, hand-coding gives you better control over your site and can easily make tweaks to the code, as you know about every little element. However, if you lack programming skills or knowledge it is advisable to hire some experienced markup conversion service provider.

Better Search Engine Ranking.

Hand-coding PSD files to HTML and CSS files, and then integrating them to WP format help make your site optimized for search engines. Wondering how? Codes written by hand contains less bugs (as discussed in the previous point), the code is clean and thus can be easily read by the search engine bots. As a result, your web pages will get indexed easily and eventually your website ranking will improve.

Web Browser Compatibility.

Besides, for such CMS conversion programming manually ensures that the code is written in compliance to W3C web standards, thereby making your website accessible on all the major browsers. Since your site can be accessed via various web browsers, it means more customers will be able to view your site and they might even visit it. This will increase your chances of getting more traffic to your site.

Also Read: A detailed insight into WordPress 3.9.2 Security Release


Conclusion

Are you confused about whether you should go for PSD to WP conversion or not? Then, reading this article will help you know about the various benefits you will get by opting for the transformation. However, if you feel any difficulty in choosing the manual coding process, it is recommended that you should seek markup conversion services of a web development company having apt experience and expertise in the field of markup conversions.

5 Grave Mistakes That Can Degrade the Quality of Your Wordpress Site

 

Wordpress is surely the go-to platform for webmasters across the globe. And advocating are the sheer overwhelming figures.

Now, whether they wish to buy a readymade theme, or get a theme created by the Photoshop to Wordpress conversion method, an investment in Wordpress is an investment in quality.

However, we, as humans have tendency to make mistakes that can well and truly be labelled as blunders. Everyone makes mistake, be it a professional or an occasional doodler. Here, we can quote a very famous saying of Oscar Wilde, “Experience is simply the name, we give to our mistakes”. Committing mistakes is not a crime, but not learning from them might leave you to utter dismay. And, in the case of Wordpress, the primary motive of a beginner is to create a website, set everything up quickly, and have the anxiety filled pleasure of seeing it up and running. In this haste, we often forget to add some essential components that ultimately hampers the progress of your website.

Here, we have outlined some common mistakes and how one can avoid them, so that you'll have a flawless Wordpress website:

1. Selecting the Wrong Platform

Novice developers often get confused between the Self Hosted Wordpress and Free Wordpress.com. It is a very common mistake made by developers. As a beginner, it's important to the know the difference between the two and which one is right choice for you. Both of them have their own purposes and objectives, for example Wordpress.com is suitable for bloggers, artists, and photographers, on the other hand, Self-hosted Wordpress is an ideal choice for those who want to establish complete control over their website. So, it's important to have a clear understanding about these two platforms.

2. Forgetting to Change the Default 'admin' Panel

This is one of the most common mistakes made by the developers. Wordpress comes with a default username 'admin', which is assigned to its adminitrator level. It's the most predictable username and makes your site vulnerable to hacking. Using this default username, hackers can easily attack your website and take control over it. So, it's crucial to change the default username with a combination of numbers, letters, and special characters to ensure the security of your website.

3. Keeping 'Wp_' as the Table Prefix

Since, Wordpress powers millions of websites thus CMS conversions are usually preferred, also it's natural tables will by default starts with 'Wp_'only, means if you don't alter your prefix, it will become very easy for hackers to perform unwanted operations in your website.

It's very easy to change the table prefix and can be performed at the time of installation as well. Wordpress offers options for manual as well as auto installation option to change your table prefix. You can choose any of them and avoid the situation of being hacked.

4. Using the default permalink structure

A permalink is a static type hyperlink for a specific blog post on your Wordpress based website. Wordpress has a default permalink structure which looks like this www.yoursite.com/?p=123, which not only looks awkward but also fails to get your website at the top of the search engines. So, it's necessary to get a user and SEO friendly permalink so that search engines can navigate through your website and get it ranked higher.

5. Forgetting to install a caching plug-in

If you are not using caching or not aware of the importance it serves to your website, then you are sure to be at lose. Catching plugin helps you to attract traffic to your website and top rankings on Google. It not only improves the efficiency but reduce the loading time whenever it gets huge traffic. There are two plugins used for catching W3C Total Catche and WP Super Catche. You can use either of them to speed up your website.

Conclusion

If you are able to avoid the above mentioned mistakes, you can surely make your Wordpress based site dynamic, fast, and more secure and your chances of being found on Google will tend to get increase.

6 E-Commerce Design Blunders You Must Be Aware Of

Selling online is something that requires a great deal of hardwork and dedication. With a 24/7 open online store, you can easily reach a global market without investing a lot of money. It can actually serve as a great boon for your business. Well, with a plenty of things to consider while designing an e-commerce website, one needs to pay special attention to every minutest detail that's crucial for developing an out-of-the-box shopping cart.

E-store designers are into the habit of committing minor and major blunders while designing an e-commerce store. That is why many start-ups or small business companies are converting their website to Wordpress and opting for other mark-up conversion services. It is highly recommended to avoid such mistakes in order to improve the experience of your customers. This is a blog that'll tell you everything about 6 common e-commerce design blunders which must be avoided as a whole in all the e-commerce website design projects. 

 

E-Commerce Design Blunder No.1-Hiding the contact details of busines

As an e-store designer, it is highly recommended to provide accurate contact information regarding the business. Consumers want to be assured about the fact that if they have any problem they'll be able to get in touch with a real person and receive the desired help. If the e-store doesn't provide any contact details, it'll become hard for the customers to trust the e-store and therefore they'll likely avoid doing business with you.

E-Commerce Design Blunder No.2- A complex/confusing checkout process

This is one of the most common mistakes made by e-commerce site designers. By designing a large/complex checkout process, you can easily get your customers confused about the steps they need to take for completing a particular transaction. Well, an ideal checkout process includes a single page wherein the customer can check the order and enter the billing and shipping details. In addition to this, there's also a confirmation page that enables the customer to check all the entered details before actually submitting his/her order.

E-Commerce Design Blunder No.3-An inadequate search functionality

As an e-store designer, it is absolutely essential for you to make sure that the search feature on your site works well. You need to ascertain that the search functionality includes filters that can enable customers to refine their search results in the desired manner. For this, you can opt for using a good built-in search engine or hunt for the best plugins that can be used for extending the search functionality incorporated within the e-store. Standard search criteria utilized by customers includes: most popular, lowest price, highest price, newest item etc.

E-Commerce Design Blunder No.4- Including tiny product images

Since online shopping is done in a virtual environment, it is absolutely essential for you to avoid the use of tiny product images. Since your main goal is to recreate and improve the user experience, tiny images won't do the job effectively. As an alternative to this, provide large images on the products page and allow customers to click on every image to zoom in the same. Make sure every image can be enlarged up to 1024x768 pixels, a recommended image size.

E-Commerce Design Blunder No.5-A dull, boring Shopping Cart Design

Shopping Cart is an incredibly crucial component of every e-commerce website. It needs to be kept as transparent as possible. Moreover, you can't compromise on the design of a shopping cart as it is the basic medium through which the customers can add multiple products, revise the product quantities and other specifications about the products. Hence, you need to ensure that the shopping cart is designed in a way that customers can use the same before proceeding ahead to the final checkout process.

E-Commerce Design Blunder No.6-Deficiency of payment options

Online shopping is all about performing transactions via credit/debit cards. As someone who's involved in designing an e-store, you must provide as many payment solutions as is practical. The reason for this being that every customer might not have a PayPal account or a Visa/MasterCard for making payments. Thus, considering different preferences of different customers, you need to cater a wide variety of payment services that are both accurate and utmost reliable.

Conclusion

So, its there now, a list of 6 common e-commerce design mistakes you must stay away from. Hope an in-depth insight into the same would have helped you understand a lot about maintaining consistency throughout the e-store design process.

PSD to HTML5 Vs PSD to XHTML Conversion – Making the Right Choice

Before you jump on the web design bandwagon, it is important to consider the mark-up language that you will use to code the PSD files. When performing a PSD to markup conversion, users either chooses HTML or XHTML as their markup language. But bear in mind that both PSD to HTML and PSD to XHTML conversions are different from each other. This certainly will leave you confused about choosing the right transformation process, and most likely you will either rack your brains or scroll the web to decide which markup conversion will best suit your needs. 

 

Basic Differences Between HTML5 and XTML

But prior to comparing PSD to HTML/XHTML conversion, it's imperative that you must be aware of the basic differences between HyperText Markup Language version 5 and XML based Extensible HyperText Markup Language, such as:

• While HTML allows omission of tags, on the other hand, XHTML doesn't allow to omit any tags.

• HTML5 contains a simplified DOCTYPE “<!DOCTYPE html>” compared to XHTML.

• While in HTML5 the name of the elements are case-sensitive, in contrast, in XHTML the element names are case sensitive and written in lower-case.

Comparison Between HTML5 and XHTML

Integrating Media Elements: Since users today show more interest in accessing websites with enticing and interactive content, primarily those having visual content than text-based content, it becomes imperative to integrate media different media types. The new 5.0 version of the HyperText Markup Language provides the ease to embed video, audio, and other media types, in comparison to XHTML. So, converting your PSD files to HTML5 format will help make your site more interactive and engaging, as you will get the flexibility to add several media elements.

Mobile Optimized Website: With increasing usage of smartphones and tablets, it's becoming important for website owners to build sites that can easily adjust to screen sizes of different mobile devices. HTML5 can be used for building sites that works better on mobile devices, conversely XHTML is best-suited for creating sites that can be accessed on computer screens.

Coding Practices: If you want to follow strict and best coding practices, then converting your photoshop document to XHTML is a better option than PSD to HTML5 transformation.

The Bottom Line

Choosing which conversion process will be superior depends on your expectations. For instance, if you are looking forward to add diverse type of media elements in your site, and want the website to be accessible on various mobile devices, definitely converting your photoshop documents to HTML5 will work in your favor. However, if you want your site content to be displayed merely for desktop screen and want to adhere to strict and proper coding practices, you can consider to convert your photoshop document into XHTML format.

5 Tips To Ensure That Your Drupal Developer Is Perfect For The Job

If you want to create a highly interactive and user friendly website without headaches, and are looking for a flexible and powerful platform for the same, then one of the best open source Content Management Systems (CMS) that is, Drupal is perfect for you. It will offer you a secure and reliable platform for developing a website and will allow you to easily manage variety of content including, podcasts, blogs, etc.

Probably, you have a design in your mind, but you are missing the skills that Drupal requires, then it is highly recommended to hire an expert professional for the job. Look for a reputed and reliable web development company and outsource them the job to Convert PSD to Drupal. Since, Drupal requires highly skilled and experienced developers, hiring some Drupal developer can ensure quality result.

Now, if you have made your mind to outsource the work to professionals, keeping some parameters in mind can help you select an efficient Drupal developer for your project. Let's have a look.

1. Knowledge and technical Competence:

A Drupal professional should have excellent expertise in Drupal and if not much, he should atleast have all the basics of Drupal on his tips. In Drupal everything rides on the technical competence of a developer. Thus, it is quite important that the hired developer should not lack this aspect.

2. Quality experience in Drupal

Experienced developer will accomplish the task with great performance and deliver quality results. He will have the insight of Drupal and so, will be able to achieve the targets before deadlines. Hence, hire a developer, who has great Drupal working experience under his belt.

3. Client feedbacks or testimonials

before hiring developers, review their old projects and their client testimonials or feedbacks. This will definitely help you gather some useful information, and you can recognize whether that developer is well-suited for your project or not.

4. Value Quality not Price

Quality costs money. This statement is true in most of the cases. That is why, it's advisable that don't run behind low bidding web development companies, because it is possible that they may compromise with work quality and thus, may deliver poor results.

5. Sincere and dedicated developer

Deadlines are very critical for every project. A developer should adhere to the set deadlines. He should work with great efficiency, keeping the aspects of target audience in mind and delivers ultimate results.

With Drupal, you can also customize the theme that is, the entire look and feel of the website can be modified or updated according to your taste. You can ask the developers for the services like PSD to Drupal Theme Conversion and put your desired appeal on your website.

Its time to convert your dream design into reality. Hire an efficient Drupal developer and get the job done with ease. Follow the above mentioned points to ensure a great Drupal developer.