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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 – Copyrighted Images, Gutenberg, Mega Menus, Gallery Plugins

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

“Ooh, that photo would be perfect for this post I’m writing. Can I use that picture?” Good question! And the answer may surprise you. Learn about the ethics and laws surrounding copyrighted images in this infographic.

So… have you tried Gutenberg yet? I broke down in January and gave it a try myself, and honestly it was not as disturbing as I’d read it was (of course by then a number of bugs had been ironed out). I’m not using it all the time, but I am using it now for some layout tasks that I would previously have added a plugin for like accordions. (Hint: if you use the Classic Editor plugin I’ve mentioned here before, you can switch back and forth between the old and new editors with one click).

If you need a guide to learn Gutenberg (I’d recommend it, it saves time over just diving in and trying to figure it out) and a resource for understanding all that it does, try Go Gutenberg. And if you start using it you’ll likely find it doesn’t have a block you need. There are a number of free plugins now with more blocks; I like CoBlocks because it was the first one I tried with a nice clean accordion block.

Shifting gears… if you’re planning a new site with a lot of pages, you may have considered using a mega menu (you know – one of those huge dropdown menus like this one on the Moleskine site). But do you really need a mega menu? Maybe not. Learn more about when to use mega menus and when it’s not really necessary.

And finally… a winter 2019 roundup of the best WordPress gallery plugins. FooGallery is still at the top of my list.

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

Weekly Links Roundup – Ecommerce Sites, PDF Links, Gallery Plugins, WordPress 5.0, Email Signups

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

Just in time for the holidays – learn 5 ways to take your ecommerce site to the next level. This is a very useful (and short) article. I totally agree with one of their points and can’t emphasize enough to clients that high-quality product photos are critical to ecommerce sites. Investing in great photography for your site will pay off by providing a strong first impression. And don’t forget – your photographer should remind you – that all product shots should be taken under the same conditions with the same background and angle.

Here’s a simple task: linking to a PDF in WordPress. It’s a help request I get fairly frequently from clients, so here’s a tutorial in how to do it yourself.

I’m a big fan of the FooGallery plugin, but always open to new things! Here’s a review of the 8 most beautiful WordPress gallery plugins.

WordPress 5.0 with the new Gutenberg editing experience came out last week. I’m holding off on updating WP Minder clients for reasons I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, but if you’re considering going for it, take a look at 7 things to know before updating to WordPress 5.0. Just in case, remember that Classic Editor is your friend!

Finally… learn how to get more email signups on your WordPress site. It’s not easy, but this article covers what you need to build your list and strategies that will help you grow your list over time.

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

Weekly Links Roundup – YouTube Embeds, Big Images, GDPR

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

A statistical milestone: WordPress now powers 30% of the top 1,000,000 websites! This is over 60% market share of all content management systems (CMS) too.

Ever struggled with (or unsure how to) get a YouTube video into your WordPress site? Here’s a nice simple guide to 4 methods for embedding YouTube videos in WordPress. Typically I use an iframe because I want more customization, including making the video look right in mobile phones and tablets, but there are easier methods…

Next let’s talk about images… Big images are often one of the worst culprits with slow-loading sites. Here are 5 tips on how to display images without causing major slowdowns.

Finally… new EU legislation called GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is coming into play as of May 25, 2018. If you sell to EU countries and/or market to them with intent, this will affect your WordPress site. But in fact, it’s good practice for anyone with a business site to pay attention to GDPR because its focus is personal data and how it’s collected and stored. More detail on this is coming soon, but this is an excellent introduction to GDPR.

 

Friday Link Wrapup – Decluttering, CloudFlare, Blogging Plugins, Lazy Loading Images

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

Is your WordPress site looking a bit cluttered? WordPress makes it easy to add lots of different kinds of content – but at some point, enough is enough (besides being harder to comprehend, too much stuff can impact performance). Here’s a quick guide for decluttering your WordPress site, making it lean, mean, and to the point for your visitors.

Recently I did a performance audit for a client and one of my recommendations was to get a CDN (content delivery network). Basically, a CDN can help speed up page load times by serving static content like images from a location nearer the user. CloudFlare is a popular CDN for WordPress that has a free service level – here’s a guide to setting up CloudFlare for WordPress. CloudFlare can also give your site a bit more security as it acts as a filtering proxy between the user and the website.

Here’s a list of top ten plugins for serious bloggers. My favorite from this list is Editorial Calendar, which is especially useful for multi-author blogs.

Finally – back to performance. If your WordPress site is slow and you’ve done the recommended fixes you got from GT Metrix or other services, you might try lazy-loading your site’s images. This means that images won’t load until the user scrolls to that part of a page. Here are some plugins for lazy loading images.

Friday Link Wrapup – Free Images, 301 Redirects, Caching

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

Finding the right images to support and enhance your written content can be a time-consuming process. Here’s a new free plugin called WP Inject (not the most encouraging name, but anyway…) that helps you search for and insert CC (Creative Commons) licensed images without leaving the editor screen. Here’s a review of the WP Inject plugin. I haven’t used this yet but it looks to be a big time-saver.

If you’ve migrated from another platform to WordPress, or done a major overhaul on content, you might be dealing with tricky 301 redirect issues. Here’s a guide to fixing 301 redirects that might be hurting SEO on your site.

Finally, here’s a guide to WordPress caching plugins. Caching pages can improve load times for site users – in some cases. This guide can also help you determine whether or not you really need that caching plugin. I personally like WP Fastest Cache best because it’s very lightweight and simple to set up.