What’s on your WordPress Menu?

Last week we talked about the WordPress header and header.php. We continue this series and this week we’ll be touching on the WordPress menu. Visitors come to a website to find answers. How they arrive, whether via an organic search, a paid ad, or a sponsored link, matters little to these information seekers. These visitors come believing that they will quickly find the answers that they need. The operative word here being quickly. (The boon and bane of hi-speed internet is that it has turned a lot of us into impatient “speed demons”.) Once these visitors have what they want and they do linger on the site after, then that’s already a bonus.

Often, these new visitors aren’t really looking for a website with flashy, awesome text animation embedded in a huge full width slider-enabled $50 premium WordPress theme. Some might, but like we said, majority of them simply want to find a quick answer to whatever they are looking for. A lot of them will look for the link to the item that led them to the site in the first-place or go straight to the menu to find their way through the site. That’s why it’s important to create a website navigation menu that will make your visitor’s website experience fruitful and pleasant at the same time.

What is website navigation anyway? What is a menu?

Navigation Defined

Navigation Menu is a theme feature introduced with Version 3.0. WordPress includes an easy to use mechanism for introducing customised navigation menus into a theme. In order to incorporate menu support into your theme, you need to add a few code segments to your theme files.
Source: WordPress Codex

There are many navigation methods employed on websites. The simplest and easiest to follow, will allow your visitors to find your information pages and enjoy the visit! Simple HTML navigation menus also provide search engines with a clearly marked road map to follow, when they scan your website.
Source: Cal Poly

The process by which a user explores all the levels of interactivity, moving forward, backward, and through the content and interface screens. Users navigate through the project by clicking on interactive controls such as buttons, image maps, and hypertext, while clues such as special colors, backgrounds, or interface sounds help orient them to where they are at within the levels of interactivity. A good navigation scheme will leave the user with little question about where they are in the document and where they can go from there.
(from Lisa Graham, The Principles of Interactive Design, 1999)

Menu Defined

A list of options displayed to the user by a data processing system, from which the user can select an action to be initiated. In text processing, a list of choices displayed to the user by a text processor from which the user can select an action to be initiated. A list of choices that can be applied to an object. A menu can contain choices that are not available for selection in certain contexts. Those choices are indicated by reduced contrast.
Source: Glasgow Caledonian University

“Good Website navigation is very important to every business website. Good text links help. When a visitor can’t easily discover where they are, what valuable business information is on the page, where to go next and how to find your Home Page or a good sitemap… they leave your website! You would never tell a customer to stand outside your business, while they try to do business with you. Poor website navigation creates the same visitor experience. Good page titles tell visitors what each page is about.

A well designed menu will allow search engine spiders and human visitors to navigate around your website and never get lost. A menu is simply a group of links to more information. Helping your visitors find information quickly, will impress potential customers. Finding good information is the key to a successful business website.”
(Source: SEOWebsitesdesigners.com)

There are several ways to set up your navigation menu system on your website: vertical, horizontal, or a combination of both. Beginning WP version 3.0, WordPress introduced a new navigation menu system and since then after numerous updates and improvements, the WordPress menu management system has made setting up navigation menus in the backend admin panel section more user friendly with lesser and lesser coding or technical knowledge required. Check out these great resources: this article by Justin Tadlock, or these tutorials WordPress menu navigation tutorial and Setting up Menus in WordPress to learn how to set up your menus in no time.

Friendly, Optimized, Ready – Really? SEO and your WordPress Theme

A lot of premium WordPress themes claim to be SEO friendly, SEO optimized, or SEO ready. Did you know that WordPress is one of the most SEO friendly CMS (content management systems) publishing platforms on the internet? SEO is actually a built in feature within WordPress, ready to embrace search engines straight out of the box. But what is SEO really all about? Is it enough to just have a pretty WordPress theme to boost your site’s traffic? Why the need for 3rd party plugins if WordPress is SEO friendly from the beginning?

Search Engine Optimization

There are many ways to define SEO and here are a few:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s “natural” or un-paid (“organic”) search results.[jargon] In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search,[1] news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.
(source: Wikipedia)

SEO is the practice of improving and promoting a web site in order to increase the number of visitors the site receives from search engines. There are many aspects to SEO, from the words on your page to the way other sites link to you on the web. Sometimes SEO is simply a matter of making sure your site is structured in a way that search engines understand.
Search Engine Optimization isn’t just about “engines.” It’s about making your site better for people too.
(source: seomoz.org)

Simply put, SEO helps you connect with your target market. It boils down to being “ find-able” to those who are already looking for you. Unfortunately, it is also true that if your website is “out of sight” it is definitely “out of the mind” of these seekers and potential customers. Even if you do “build” a beautiful website, they won’t necessarily “come” unless they are family and friends who just want to be supportive of you. Bottom line, no matter how pretty your website is, you need SEO to make sure that your beautiful website can be found and appreciated.

Another culprit to your WordPress site being “out of sight, out of mind” of the search engines is the WordPress theme you use. Not all premium themes are SEO optimized, friendly, or ready even if they claim to be so. Yes, WordPress is SEO friendly by default but if you install, customize and use various theme to meet your own needs, your “premium” theme might actually break some of those useful search engine features and do more harm than good to your rankings.

Here are some SEO basics straight from Google’s mouth to make sure your WordPress theme is truly SEO friendly, optimized and ready:

Create unique, accurate page titles

Choose a title that effectively communicates the topic of the page’s content. Each of your pages should ideally have a unique title tag, which helps Google know how the page is distinct from the others on your site. Titles can be both short and informative. If the title is too long, Google will show only a portion of it in the search result.

Make use of the “description” meta tag

Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result.

Improve the structure of your URLs

URLs with words that are relevant to your site’s content and structure are friendlier for visitors navigating your site. Visitors remember them better and might be more willing to link to them. Use a directory structure that organizes your content well and makes it easy for visitors to know where they’re at on your site.

Make your site easier to navigate

Make it as easy as possible for users to go from general content to the more specific content they want on your site. Add navigation pages when it makes sense and effectively work these into your internal link structure. Controlling most of the navigation from page to page on your site through text links makes it easier for search engines to crawl and understand your site.

Offer quality content and services

Users enjoy content that is well written and easy to follow. It’s always beneficial to organize your content so that visitors have a good sense of where one content topic begins and another ends. Breaking your content up into logical chunks or divisions helps users find the content they want faster. New content will not only keep your existing visitor base coming back, but also bring in new visitors.

Write better anchor text

The anchor text you use for a link should provide at least a basic idea of what the page linked to is about. Aim for short but descriptive text-usually a few words or a short phrase. Make it easy for users to distinguish between regular text and the anchor text of your links. Your content becomes less useful if users miss the links or accidentally click them.

Optimize your use of images

Like many of the other parts of the page targeted for optimization, filenames and alt text (for ASCII languages) are best when they’re short, but descriptive. If you do decide to use an image as a link, filling out its alt text helps Google understand more about the page you’re linking to. Imagine that you’re writing anchor text for a text link. An Image Sitemap file can provide Googlebot with more information about the images found on your site. Its structure is similar to the XML Sitemap file for your web pages.

Use heading tags appropriately

Heading tags (not to be confused with the HTML tag or HTTP headers) are used to present structure on the page to users. There are six sizes of heading tags, beginning with h1, the most important, and ending with h6, the least important (1).

Similar to writing an outline for a large paper, put some thought into what the main points and subpoints of the content on the page will be and decide where to use heading tags appropriately. Use heading tags where it makes sense. Too many heading tags on a page can make it hard for users to scan the content and determine where one topic ends and another begins.

Make effective use of robots.txt

Restrict crawling where it’s not needed with robots.txt. A “robots.txt” file tells search engines whether they can access and therefore crawl parts of your site.

Be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links

Setting the value of the “rel” attribute of a link to “nofollow” will
tell Google that certain links on your site shouldn’t be followed
or pass your page’s reputation to the pages linked to.
Nofollowing a link is adding rel=”nofollow” inside of the link’s anchor tag.

Notify Google of mobile sites

Configure mobile sites so that they can be indexed accurately. Verify that your mobile site is indexed by Google. A Mobile Sitemap can be submitted using Google Webmaster Tools, just like a standard Sitemap.

Guide mobile users accurately

When a mobile user or crawler (like Googlebot-Mobile) accesses the desktop version of a URL, you can redirect them to the corresponding mobile version of the same page. If you redirect users, please make sure that the content on the corresponding mobile/desktop URL matches as closely as possible.

Promote your website in the right ways

Sites built around user interaction and sharing have made it easier to match interested groups of people up with relevant content. As people discover your content through search or other ways and link to it, Google understands that you’d like to let others know about the hard work you’ve put into your content

Make use of free webmaster tools

Improve the crawling and indexing of your site using Google’s free Webmasters Tools or other services. Google offers a variety of tools to help you analyze traffic on your site.

These are the SEO basics that you can use to assess whether your WordPress theme or your website is optimized or not. If you would like to read more on these SEO basics, check out Google’s free pdf resource “Search Engine Optimizer Guide”.

Specialty: Clean Business WordPress Theme

The main purpose of a business theme is to create awareness, generate interest, and convert casual visitors to engaged followers/clients/customers. For a business theme to be effective, it has to have the following elements:

  • Great SEO capabilities.
  • Great design recall.
  • Readable, well organized text and multimedia content.
  • Effective interactive feedback system.

WP Business Bundle just released Specialty, a responsive premium WordPress theme designed to present your business or your company in a clear and concise manner. Overall, the theme is clean, modern and generous with whitespace. It has a great, sizeable slider that can really grab attention of casual visitors. Visitors are given control over slider transitions which gives each slide the appropriate airtime based on visitor preference.

Content is definitely readable on this theme. Font size and spacing between text boxes are great, giving visitors an uncluttered, relaxed reading experience. Images are displayed in a clean, well organized portfolio grid style which can also be sorted according to category. There’s also the option to use a jQuery masonry layout for those who want that Pinterest look. Thumbnails are slightly bigger that typical portfolio pages giving visitors a better overview of the work. Pages containing detailed narratives include large images of the work. This theme can also handle video and it includes a large section where you can showcase a special video or image right on the homepage.

Specialty does have a responsive design giving visitors the chance to appreciate the site’s content on smartphones and tablets. Specialty includes a basic contact form, custom post types, an easy to use custom panel, and just the right amount of widgets and features to get your site up and running without much fuss.

More Features:

  • Import/Export Functionality for Theme Options
  • Seven Pre-Defined Color Schemes
  • Breadcrumb Navigation
  • Adjustable Footer Widget Area (1-4 Columns)
  • Custom Post Types: Slider | Portfolio |Testimonial
  • Engaging Portfolio Layout with jQuery Masonry
  • HTML5 Markup | CSS3 Effects

Specialty Premium WordPress Theme is part of a bundle of themes and business-tailored plugins at WP Business Bundle available starting from $79. This theme includes documentation, future updates. For an additional $9 per month, you also get the PSD files, XML files, and access to the theme’s support forum.

Join WP Business Bundle Now

On Becoming a WordPress Professional

How does one become a certified WordPress professional indeed? Earning your stripes as a WordPress professional does not come from a course you enroll in and study for X number of years in your regular university. Neither do you get a degree or a diploma for the numerous WordPress conferences, seminars or webinars you attend. In truth, becoming a WordPress professional is not age bound, race bound, location bound, language bound or educational background bound. One key ingredient is the willingness to learn, make mistakes, and learn all over again.

Many current WordPress professionals and practitioners did not start out as such. Perhaps some have come out from the corporate world and taken a radical sabbatical from their daily grind while others probably started out in their dorm room or garage. Maybe others began tinkering with WordPress while they were in their teens while some are going through a second wind in their careers. The Internet has this built-in democratic leveling quality where anyone can make it regardless. Since the year is about to end, maybe some of you are considering a quiet change or transition into something else – a new career path of sorts. You don’t necessarily have to be a developer or a designer to be a WordPress professional. Here are a few options for you to think of if you are considering a shift into the exciting world of WordPress:

Developer

Web development is the back-end of the website, the programming and interactions on the pages. A web developer focuses on how a site works and how the customers get things done on it. Good web developers know how to program CGI and scripts like PHP. They understand about how web forms work and can keep a site running effectively.A good web developer will have excellent programming skills and be able to use a range of programming tools. He or she will be able to provide solutions to give a website the functions required. Web developers will use a range of programming tools such as ASP, Javascript, XML and SQL. The focus is more on the backend and the functionality of the site.

Designer (Themes)

Web design determines the look and feel of a website. It covers the layout, navigation and colors of a website. Web design is more concerned with aesthetics and user experience than functions. A web designer will make a website easy to use and fit for purpose. A good web designer will have graphic design skills and a good understanding of marketing. He or she will know how to grab the attention of visitors and encourage them to explore a website. A web designer is concerned with how a site looks and how the customers interact with it. Good web designers know how to put together the principles of design to create a site that looks great. They also understand about usability and how to create a site that customers want to navigate around in.

Developer (Plugins and Widgets)

Plug-ins and widgets are a great way to enhance the functionality of your site by adding in extra features. These can be placed anywhere inside your template by function hooks. You can start creating and eventually selling stand-alone plugins that add value to existing or new themes.

Support Professional

One of the most common deficiencies in the WordPress themes marketplace is the lack of or absence of theme support. You can start a career by being part of a support team that is responsible for providing after-sales support to customers who have purchased specific themes.

Consultant/Marketing

Providing consultancy services, networking, and hooking up clients with designers and developers is another option to becoming a WordPress Professional. Many times, a lot of great designers do poorly sales-wise because of a lack of marketing skills. You can offer your services to acts as a marketing consultant to WordPress designers and developers who have little or no time to do the marketing themselves.

Blogger/ Theme Description Writer

With the explosion of WordPress themes in the marketplace, there is very little difference between one theme to the next and a lot of them look like clones. You can offer your services as a writer to create a marketing hook for designers and developers who would rather write code than a marketing spiel.

Documentation Writer

Providing appropriate and useful detailed documentation that is easy to understand even by WordPress beginners is another option. Transcribing the installation and setting up process in easy to follow steps adds value to the theme and a well written piece will mean less resources spent on support.

WordPress Trainor

If you have acquired a certain level of proficiency in WordPress and you are confident enough about what you know, you can also try going into teaching and training.

These are just a few ideas to think of as you consider starting or shifting to a career as a WordPress professional.

Best Shopping Cart Plugins for WordPress in 2013

Online shopping has been steadily growing in the last few years. As more and more people engage in business transactions on the web, it is fitting for WordPress sites to be ready for this flurry of eCommerce activity. Here are some of what we consider the best eCommerce plugins for the upcoming year.

Cart66

The Cart66 WordPress ecommerce plugin makes selling easier than ever before. With Cart66 you can sell electronics, digital downloads, videos, music, web hosting, legal services, collect membership fees, and more. Online selling need not be so complicated. This plugin makes selling anything as simple and as easy as can be. Cart66 integrates major merchant tools such as Amazon S3, for delivering digital products, and popular payment gateways such as Paypal’s payment system for collecting payments from sales. There is also a Lite Version which can be downloaded for free from the WordPress repository.

Jigoshop

This eCommerce plugin is the basis for the popular WooCommerce solution. While the two plugins have diverged development wise, Jigoshop maintains the clean, well written code philosophy both plugins have. Jigoshop provides you with the features necessary to set up an eCommerce website in no time with the option to create a multitude of product types and apply detailed attributes customers can easily refine your catalog, ensuring they find what they’re looking for in just a couple of clicks. It is one of the fastest growing plugins and has an emerging ecosystem of extensions that go with it.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a free, open source eCommerce plugin that is easy to install, use and extend. This very popular plugin is built for flexibility. It has great built in functionalities such as reporting, tax and shipping capabilities, products and inventory, supports numerous payment gateways, and so much more. The basic functionality can also be beefed up with available extension upgrades to match your business requirements. WooCommerce is an eCommerce tool kit that you can tailor to your specific needs.

MarketPress

MarketPress is an easy to use and powerful ecommerce / shopping cart plugin available for WordPress. This plugin was developed from the ground up to make it simple to set up a stylish online shop, MarketPress has all the features you need, including: Multiple payment gateways (PayPal, Authorize.net, Google checkout, 2checkout, Moneybookers, eWay, Cubepoints and more), fully internationalized by the WPML crew, and includes provision for shipping, coupons, Google Analytics Ecommerce tracking, sale pricing, unlimited product variations. Not only that, it’s also free.

WP Marketplace

The WP Marketplace plugin is a full-featured WordPress Shopping Cart/e-commerce system that is extremely easy to install and even easier to maintain. It has everything you need to build a complete online shop – from front-end management to shipping to payment gateways to analytics to social marketing and SEO features. WP Marketplace is an eCommerce tool that can turn your website into a money making machine.

Origin WordPress Theme by Elegant Themes

It is a constant challenge for artists, photographers and creative professionals to promote their work and gain new clientele. Thankfully, the Internet provides an avenue where people can connect to other people wherever they are in the world in a very efficient manner. In order to take advantage of this infrastructure, artists who want their portfolio to stand out from the crowd need to put up well designed websites to effectively exhibit works of art and other creative output.

Origin Premium WordPress Theme is the latest theme from Elegant themes targeted at creative professionals. It is designed to be a showcase solution for creative work and it does so in a stunning way. This premium WordPress theme’s take on the grid layout is not uncommon. What makes it stand out is the attention to design details and concern for the user experience. The theme can give visitors an overall view of the portfolio, or it can also serve as a one page catalogue for whatever images, products or projects that need to be showcased.

Origin is beautiful eye candy but catching a potential client’s eye is one thing, converting him or her into a loyal customer is another. This portfolio styled theme has what it takes to deliver both. This responsive theme serves as that portal where the the target clientele can go beyond admiring the work and actually connect with the creative professional and eventually work together.

If you haven’t seen Origin Premium WordPress Theme in action, head on over to Elegant Themes and take it for a spin. You’ll be glad you did.

More Features:

  • Responsive design
  • ePanel Theme Options
  • Large collection of shortcodes
  • Premade Page Templates
  • Perpetual Updates
  • Secure and Valid Code
  • Browser Compatibility
  • Complete Localization
  • Five Unique Colors
  • Unparalleled Support

Origin Premium WordPress Theme includes top-notch tech support provided by Elegant themes’ support staff to help you setup your site and get it running in no time.

Origin Theme: $39 | Demo & Download

30 of the Best Shopify Themes (Free & Awesome)

Do you prefer to shop from shabby looking shops? Well, I am sure that all of us will be answering this question with a resounding NO. If that is the case, then why should shopping online be any different. It is imperative these days for a website owner to have an inviting, user-friendly experience lest you go the way of obscurity.

Application of a useful and at the same time beautiful theme in the website therefore becomes extremely important. Readily downloadable themes or templates compatible with different kinds of websites are available on the internet which can be used by designers as a starting point of their projects. Or it can be useful for novice designers who want to draw valuable inspiration from these examples thereafter start developing their own unique template. If you download a free shopify theme, then the work of the designer will be simplified and become much faster as well. These templates come with many useful features like ability to connect with the social networking sites, full customization features whereby the developer can amend it according to his own needs and all the latest technologies. With the use of these templates your website is surely going to stand out from the rest. It doesn’t end with having a unique template and features, its all depends on how well and different you do business. You can find experiences of popular ecommerce experts and help articles on blogs like Shopify ecommerce blog.

In addition to our article on some of the best ecommerce WordPress Themes of 2013, we have also created this detailed list of the 30 best and most diverse shopify websites for you designers out there. They can build up a unique, attractive and at the same extremely interactive platform with the help of these themes.

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35 of the Best eCommerce WordPress Themes 2013

Believe it or not, 2013 is right around the corner, and we want you to be prepared. Thanks to some big advancements in eCommerce functionality for WordPress in 2012, the Best eCommerce Themes of 2013 are sure to be amazing. eCommerce is simply the commerce conducted through the Internet. With millions of websites, blogs, and Internet users, more and more businesses are taking their products online. The successes of sites like Amazon and Ebay has dispelled all skepticism about eCommerce websites – not to mention the scores of “mom and pop” operations selling everything from ebooks to digital hugs…yes…some people are making money selling completely made up things.

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25 Very Useful WordPress Calendar Plugins for 2013

Time management is one of the biggest problems faced by business owners be they digital business or brick and mortar. There are too many things to do and when you do one thing you obviously can’t do something else (MBA programs call this the “opportunity cost”). Therefore, to manage your time properly and make the most out of the few working hours that exist each day, you must find the best tools to help you manage your time properly. Enter digital calendars.

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