How To Make Your WordPress Site Mobile Friendly In 60 Seconds

by

WordPress site mobile

Over the past several years, smartphones have revolutionized how we connect to the internet, and interact with others around the world. According to Pew Research Center, 34 percent of adults own a tablet, and 56 percent of adults own a smartphone. Chances are, some of your readers are consuming your content using one of the two devices.

If you have yet to make your WordPress site mobile friendly, here are a few problems:

  • Longer load times. Not everyone is able to enjoy 4G speeds, and even on 3G, a typical web page can far exceed the average 7.25 second load time for web users.
  • Poor user experience. Your blog may look great on a desktop or laptop, but when you shrink it down to a screen as small as 3.5-inches, it becomes a jumbled mess.
  • Adding to your reader’s phone bill. Okay, maybe it’s not that bad, but a lot of smartphone users are on a capped data plan. If a blog post requires a few megabytes of information to be loaded, that’s data use you could have easily avoided.

To make your WordPress site mobile friendly, many think they have to go find a theme, do all this coding, or hire someone to do it for them. That’s completely fine, and there are many exceptional examples out there. However, you don’t have to do that, let alone spend any money. [Read more…]

ManageWP Makes Multi-Blog WordPress Management Easy And Affordable

by

ManageWP FrontpageManaging even a handful of WordPress websites can be a pain, for example 10 websites means 10 different login accounts that you must access each time you want to write an article, update plugins or change theme settings. While you could give WordPress Multi-Site a chance that system can be confusing and time consuming for non-Wordpress experts. ManageWP however takes care of multi-site management by installing a simple plugin on each of your WordPress blogs which then allows them to be controlled by a single user login interface found at ManageWP.com

Once you have signed up for a free trial account you simply install the sites plugin on each of your websites. This plugin essentially gives you access to your blogs from within the ManageWP administration panel.

After the system has been installed you will be asked to add websites to your panel, those websites will then be accessible via the ManageWP login panel. Once installed the system then provides many useful features.

For example you can choose to add and upgrade themes for all of your websites from one screen, removing the need to log into various accounts.  The system also allows users to be bulk added for login purposes.

If you run a network in which posts are added to more than one website at a time ManageWP also provides a “Bulk Add” option for posts and pages. I personally found the “Add New Page” option helpful when creating privacy and copyright polices for various websites. [Read more…]

Install The WordPress Popup Scheduler Plugin For Better Readers Engagement

by

Getting your visitors’ attention and encouraging them to interact on your blog is often a hard task. Popups are the obvious choice when it comes to this sort of situation, but you don’t want to annoy your visitors or run them away. This is why the WordPress Popup Scheduler plugin is the ideal choice because it has numerous customization options, which allow you to customize it to suit your needs and be less obtrusive. As you’ll see from the customization options, popups don’t have to be annoying or boring. And this is the reason why we have installed it on our psd to html conversion blog.

Here’s what you can do with the WordPress Popup Scheduler plugin.

When to Show

You can decide when you’d like your popup to appear to your visitors, by choosing one of the following options:

  • When new visitors arrive
  • When visitors return for the (second, third, fourth or fifth) visit
  • Starting from a specific date for a certain number of days or for every few number of days
  • At all times
  • Whenever you make changes to the popup content

Set a Delay

You can have the popup show immediately when a visitor lands on the page or you can delay it for a specific number of seconds. We did that in our business neon signs store because we wanted the users to be able to learn more about the product first. So it’s probably best to wait a few seconds so that your visitors aren’t bombarded as soon as they land on your site. [Read more…]

WP Super Cache Gets Bumped to 0.9.6.1

by

Donncha O Caoimh has announced the release of WP Super Cache version 0.9.6.1. This upgrade to the popular caching plugin (which really should be a part of WordPress core) brings a few bug fixes and some other things, where this should interest most users:

You can now choose to not cache different types of pages on your blog. Don’t want to cache your front page? That’s easy now. The indented page types are types covered by the top type. “Archives” covers “Tag” and “Category” pages for example.

That’s right, stop caching of the front page if you will. Apparently works like Conditional Tags, which sounds good.

Get it now if you need caching.

Weblog Tools Collection WordPress Plugin Competition 3.0

by

Weblog Tools Collection WordPress Plugin Competition logoThere is no doubt in the WordPress Community. The best Plugin competition has started: The Weblog Tools Collection WordPress Plugin Competition 2009 (3.0).

If you are new to the WordPress Community, you may not even know that you are probably using a WordPress Plugin generated during a past WTC WordPress Plugin Competition. There have been some incredible great and innovative – not to mention useful – WordPress Plugins such as: [Read more…]

The Liz Strauss Comment Counter Plugin Stirs Comment Controversy

by

The Liz Strauss Comment Counter by Ozh WordPress Plugin has been released by PlanetOzh and it is stirring up comment controversy everywhere.

Recently, John C. Dvorak of PCMag asked what’s the value of online comments, bringing up an issue that confronts many bloggers as they mature in the blogging world.

At first, comments were greeted with fear. Fear of how to control them, whether they were worth the risk of opening yourself up to feedack. Fear of exposure – what if someone will really respond? Soon, blogging became defined by its interactive purpose – a blog wasn’t a blog unless it had comments. A race was on to encourage readers to comment which escalated into a measure of a blog’s success. A comment was a point in our favor that we were on the right blogging track.

With the advent of comment spam, especially human comment spammers and those eager for Google Page Rank scores to raise from links within comments, bloggers grew weary of fighting an uphill battle for quality comments and interaction. With the increase in clever comment spammers, it’s becoming harder than ever to tell a good comment from a bad comment. Don’t get me started on the subject of comment trolls spoiling the blogging experience for so many.

Now, Dvorak and many more are asking themselves if comments are worth more than the trouble they cause. [Read more…]

PodPress Update in 10 Days

by

PodPress is probably the most used podcasting plugin for WordPress, and the one we’ve been using here at The Blog Herald. However, there have been issues with it since WordPress 2.5, and it doesn’t work with recently released 2.6. Among others that are frustrated are David Peralty, who’s written about the issue.

Luckily, the PodPress developer says that we can expect a 2.6 compatible release within 10 days.

I wonder when WordPress will get native podcasting support, similar to the PodPress plugin? It is about time, I’d say.