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Weekly Links Roundup – Blogging Misconceptions, Tweeting for Business, WooCommerce Images, Multisite

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

If you’re thinking about starting a blog for your business, and are feeling a bit intimidated, here’s something for you. Learn about two misconceptions about blogging that are 180 degrees apart. Is blogging ‘just writing’ or does it really require ‘superhuman effort?’ Turns out that neither of those views is really very accurate, and somewhere in the middle is a more reasonable conclusion.

If you use Twitter to promote your business (or want to start), what should you tweet about? Here are 21 easy ideas for business tweets. Some of these can also be good to use on other social platforms you might frequent for your business, like Facebook or LinkedIn, though the article is focused on short tweetable content.

I’m building a WooCommerce site for a client right now and had some issues with gallery thumbnail image sizing. Here’s a useful and recent post containing all you may need to know about WooCommerce images. If you need a little more focus on resizing those products try this second post on changing WooCommerce image sizes.

Finally… if you have a need to run several WordPress sites on one server and would like to manage them all from a single control panel, WordPress Multisite may be for you. Here is a great and comprehensive guide to Multisite just published last month. Is your company or organization a candidate for the networking tools that Multisite provides? Maybe, if you’re:

  • A company with different departments each with their own website
  • A university or school with various departments and also student/faculty who need their own sites
  • A global or chain business where each location has its own website
  • A gym where each trainer needs their own site
  • Basically any situation where you need a network of sites under the control of one administrator.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – WooCommerce, Sales Tax, SEO Checklist, Color Psychology

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

iThemes has published a post with pro tips for more WooCommerce conversions – and who doesn’t want that?

And speaking of online sales, here’s a step-by-step guide to setting up automatic tax calculations in WooCommerce. You don’t want to deal with over 12,000 sales tax jurisdictions in the US alone – let WooCommerce (and maybe TaxJar, depending on the complexity of your business setup) manage this for you. WooCommerce Tax is free, and TaxJar is a commercial plugin.

Here’s a great infographic that has a ton of useful SEO advice in checklist format – which I find way easier to use. While not all of this may apply to your situation, it’s a nice comprehensive resource, and has printable checklists available at the end of the short article (right above the infographic).

Design Tip: color can make a big difference in how a user perceives your company and its offerings. Read this post on how using color psychology can help increase conversions on your website.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Event Calendars, WooCommerce SEO, Blog Kickstart, Category Pages

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

Need a great event calendar for your WordPress site. This post (don’t worry that it’s from 2017, it’s all good) reviews 9 top WordPress event calendar plugins, both free and commercial. I’m currently a fan of the free My Calendar plugin for its good looks and ease of use. Take a look at My Calendar in action on my client’s website.

Optimizing a WooCommerce site for SEO is not as easy as a non-ecommerce site, but it’s still very doable even by non-experts. Learn how to boost WooCommerce SEO with the goal of bringing more customers to your site in this post that includes 10 straightforward tips.

If your blog has been in a bit of a slowdown lately for one reason or another (1-month vacation? Long holiday period? Unplanned time off from blogging?) then you may need a kickstart getting it moving again. Here’s a podcast from the venerable ProBlogger Darren Rowse on how to restart blogging after a slump.

And finally… If you like customizing the look of your blog, have you tried custom category pages? Here’s a great post on how to crank up the appeal of category pages. Warning: some theme file modification is required for this mod. If you’re not comfortable doing that, contact us for custom coding help and get a sharp new look for your blog categories.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – WordPress Headaches, Remarketing, Restaurant Sites, Font Awesome

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

The top three most-mentioned WordPress pain points are performance, security, and updates that break sites. I hear you. These are all things I deal with for myself and for clients on a daily basis. Here’s an infographic on the biggest WordPress headaches for 2018. If you need help with them, please let me know. We do performance analysis and optimization, security audits, and manage site updates for our clients – minding your site so you can manage your business.

A few of my clients do remarketing (displaying ads to people who have already visited and/or interacted with your site or social media account or mailing list). Others are not familiar with the concept. Here’s a good primer on both Google and Facebook remarketing.

Though this particular article is targeting developers, it may be helpful to you if you’re thinking of starting a website for your restaurant. As always, if you need help with project discovery, consulting, design or development, please contact me.

Font Awesome icons are great – they look good, there are thousands to pick from, and because they’re not images you can resize them freely with no quality loss. Adding Font Awesome icons to WordPress is pretty easy – here are three methods.

And finally – May was the 15th anniversary of the release of WordPress. Here’s the original announcement. Happy Birthday, WP.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Email Newsletters, Hosting, Maintenance Plugins, Scrolling

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

I believe I’ve gone over this before, but you should never rely on WordPress to send email newsletters. Learn why (emails will often be flagged as spam especially if you’re on shared hosting, or may not be received at all due to server settings) and see the alternatives.

If you’re looking for a managed WordPress host, I work with an awesome one (WP Engine) but some of the others are somewhat less desirable. This is an opinion piece detailing the inner workings of one of those offerings. I’m happy to provide high-quality WordPress hosting recommendations at different price points for clients.

If you ever need to hide your site from public view temporarily (say you’re doing a logo update or some other change to your live site), you need a maintenance plugin. Here’s a review of 5 of the top WordPress maintenance plugins that will do the job.

Finally…

Here’s a big myth that I’ve had trouble convincing clients about in the past: people don’t scroll. It’s not true – they do scroll. Everything doesn’t have to be at the very top of your page. See the research results.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Disabling Comments, Stripe and WooCommerce, Blogging

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

Should you disable comments on your blog? That can be a big question for some – consider whether comments provide value to your site and readers or not. Is it mostly spam? A plugin can fix that. There are measures you can take that don’t require you get rid of commenting completely. But sometimes, disabling may be the best course.

I’m a big fan of the payment processor Stripe. I use it with WooCommerce, Gravity Forms, and any other ecommerce-enabled plugin that supports it. If you’re not familiar with Stripe and are interested in trying it with your WooCommerce site, here’s a post that will interest you.

For those of you who regularly experience headaches when you think about the blogging you need to be doing for your business, here’s a short but valuable guide to crafting epic blog posts to engage your readers.

And finally, along those same lines, here’s a post that help you learn to snag readers’ eyes through better blog post formatting. Chunking content into bite-sized bits makes a difference!