WordPress eCommerce Opportunities for WordPress Professionals for 2014

The Internet has significantly changed and reshaped the workforce profile in the last few years. It has opened up opportunities for work outside of the traditional 9 to 5 setup and the lure of “work from home” or “work anywhere” is irresistible. Because of this, more and more people are opting to liberate themselves from the office cubicle and pursue non traditional work opportunities because of the flexible work hours and the income potential it presents – most of which can be found online.

The global economic landscape is flat in the sense that anyone in the world, regardless of location or educational attainment, can become the next big business online. The challenge for most businesses is how to take their bricks and mortar mentality into the world of bricks and clicks.These people need experts who can help them build their dream business – online. For WordPress professionals, the opportunities to service this sector cannot be ignored.

According to comScore,

The comScore report found that retail e-commerce sales produced over $50 billion dollars last quarter. The study found that e-commerce sales have seen double-digit growth for 10 consecutive quarters. While growth this quarter was strong, comScore found that it was slightly down from the previous two quarters.

“The first quarter of 2013 was fairly strong for online retailers, with total e-commerce sales surpassing $50 billion for only the second time on record,” said comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni.
“While the year-over-year growth rate of 13 percent remained healthy, it was a point or two below that of the preceding quarters.”

According to the report, sales growth was down one percentage point on a quarter-over-quarter basis. E-commerce sales growth was also reported to be down two percentage points since Q3 2012. Fulgoni surmised that the slowdown was caused by payroll tax increases, which took effect in 2013.

ComScore’s report found that digital content and subscriptions, apparel, sport/fitness, consumer electronics, and consumer-packaged goods saw the greatest amount of e-commerce sales growth this quarter. The report shows that all categories saw over 20 percent growth year-over-year.

Here are a few key strategies WordPress professionals can use on how to take advantage of the booming WordPress eCommerce business opportunities:

Think Local, Sell Global. – think of businesses and services in your local area that have the potential to go global

  • local retail stores in your community that can sell globally – eg. books, accessories, jewelry, hobby stores, food, specialty shops
  • personal and professional services – consultants, freelancers, financial advisers, coaching services, tutorials, accountants, DIY-ers
  • NGOs, events, charitable institutions, fundraisers, non profit organizations
  • niche businesses – realtors, travel agents, auto dealers
  • small to medium scale businesses

Master the eCommerce process and understand how each step functions. WordPress professionals need to be well-versed on how the standard eCommerce process works:

  • shopping cart – should be simple enough for the customer (eg. WooCommerce, easy digital downloads, gravity forms, etc.)
  • payment gateway
  • merchant account
  • merchant’s bank account

Study your client’s needs and specifications and how you can integrate, merge, or streamline their current business practices and processes to their website. Don’t be afraid to ask questions and provide suggestions on how to modify or improve how transactions are processed.

Price yourself right. – Building an eCommerce site is more than just choosing an eCommerce supported WordPress theme, adding a plugin, and hitting the publish button. Consider the scope and the size of the whole project, the after installation support, and any additional web admin and system maintenance support you might be asked to provide before giving a price quote.

One of the highlights of the comScore Q1 2013 report says that,

E-commerce accounted for 10.6 percent of discretionary dollars spent, the highest share on record.

There is no turning back to business as usual. eCommerce is here to stay and it’s momentum is on the rise and WordPress professionals have every opportunity to take advantage of it.

One Page WordPress Themes – October 2013

One Page WordPress themes are becoming quite popular lately. Not only do these ultra simplified and straightforward themes look brilliant but they are also faster loading. Some say they also produce higher conversion rates. Here are some of the latest One Page WordPress themes you need to check out:

GoBlack One Page Parallax WordPress Theme

GoBlack Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and modern single-page portfolio styled theme ideal for the promoting services of creatives, design agencies, or creative freelancers in a professional manner. This 100% fully responsive theme was built in HTML5 and CSS3 using Parallax javascript to create the animated parallax image effects that make it engaging and dynamic. GoBlack features include the revolution slider, unique portfolio scroll animation, smooth tabless design, fentancy black color schemes, and so much more.

Prisma One Page Responsive WordPress Theme

Prisma Premium WordPress Theme was developed with a goal to provide a quick solution to create an impressive modern website with an easily editable layout without sacrificing unique aesthetics. This bold, fully responsive one page theme built with Bootstrap 2.3.2 is easy to customize and includes features such as: filterable portfolio with integrated Fancybox, animated retina-ready splash menu, and also single page layout with stand-alone page setup option among others.

Flavor One Page Parallax WordPress Theme

Flavor Premium WordPress Theme is a warm and classic looking one page premium theme that will surely make your portfolio stand out. The generous space dedicated to presenting images (filterable) is readily accessible and gives visitors a very good idea of the quality of your work. Salient features of this theme include: modular homepage – layout sections + layout shortcodes, smooth tabless design, parallax effect, flexible grid system built with Bootstrap, among many.

Webmakers One Page WordPress Theme

Webmakers Premium WordPress Theme is a single page, clean and minimalist style WordPress theme recommended for creatives, freelancers and agencies. This theme comes with 5 pre-made theme skins, powerful theme options with ability to change typography, unlimited style settings for colors, fonts, and other design elements, a custom plugin based shortcode generator to build theme element easily, a built in ajax contact form, to name a few.

Cingle Responsive One Page WordPress Theme

Cingle Premium WordPress Theme is a clean, responsive multi purpose One Page WordPress theme ideal for a range of web uses. This premium theme will work well for business or corporate portfolios, creative agencies, design professionals, or even freelance professionals who want a more flexible theme to meet their various needs. Cingle features an ultra responsive design (enable/disable), sticky navigation, light and dark styles, parallax, Google Analytics tracking code, unlimited theme customization options, etc. to get your website to where you want it to be.

Simple Easy Parallax Retina WordPress Theme

Simple Premium WordPress Theme is an impressive, modern and yet very easy to use flat design WordPress theme with both single page and multiple page layout options. This fully responsive theme inspired by cool metro colors and built with Bootstrap includes features such as: mobile optimized parallax feature, animated contents, retina display optimization, touch optimized responsive layout, filterable expanding portfolio, and fully tested it on iPhone 5, iPad 4, S3 android and Windows Phone.

Visia Responsive One Page Retina WordPress Theme

Visia Premium WordPress Theme is a beautiful, minimalist, fully responsive retina ready single page WordPress theme that will surely impress your visitors. This premium theme includes a separate blog section and is suitable for any kind of creative or business use. Visia is highly optimized for both mobile and desktop platforms and uses a lazy-loading support for images, assets and compression of all required scripts for lightning fast loading time. It also features a built in custom thumbnail cropping tool to help you control images you need to highlight for your posts.

Omni One Page/Multi Page Parallax Flat WordPress Theme

Omni Premium WordPress Theme is a high quality, flat and full responsive WordPress theme for creative businesses or photographers. This Bootstrap built modern theme gives you 5 amazing header options to choose from (portfolio, revolution slider, video, parallax, layer slider).You can add unlimited pages and separators to each page and customize them according to your own preferences.You also have a choice between the One Page and the MultiPage version which can be easily switched in the Admin panel.

WordPress 3.6 and Beyond

Oscar is out of the can! No, it’s not a trash can and Oscar ain’t grouchy either. Named in honor of the great jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, WordPress 3.6 Oscar is out of beta and has been officially released premiered with a cool video to go along with it. Matt Mullenweg introduced the latest version in WordCamp San Francisco and along with several other announcements. Versions 3.7 and 3.8 are close on its heels too with a tentative fall and end of the year release together with a book in the offing. It can only get better.

Here are some of the highlights of WordPress 3.6 Oscar to get excited about:

User Features

  • The new Twenty Thirteen theme inspired by modern art puts focus on your content with a colorful, single-column design made for media-rich blogging.
  • Revamped Revisions save every change and the new interface allows you to scroll easily through changes to see line-by-line who changed what and when.
  • Post Locking and Augmented Autosave will especially be a boon to sites where more than a single author is working on a post. Each author now has their own autosave stream, which stores things locally as well as on the server (so much harder to lose something) and there’s an interface for taking over editing of a post, as demonstrated beautifully by our bearded buddies in the video above.
  • Built-in HTML5 media player for native audio and video embeds with no reliance on external services.
  • The Menu Editor is now much easier to understand and use.

Developer features

  • A new audio/video API gives you access to metadata like ID3 tags.
  • You can now choose HTML5 markup for things like comment and search forms, and comment lists.
  • Better filters for how revisions work, so you can store a different amount of history for different post types.

The Future: WordPress 3.7 & 3.8, WordPress The Book, and a whole lot more

Matt Mullenweg mentioned that the first chapter of WordPress The Book – a book about the history of WordPress – is currently being written in Github similar to the way the software itself started. They’ve also been working on security and stability features He also announced a developer resource dedicated to WordPress developers (developer.wordpress.org). He also mentioned the work they were currently doing on the MP6 plugin project and the development of WordPress 3.7 and 3.8 aiming for smaller teams, quicker iterations, less bottlenecks, and temporary hooks. In WordPress 3.7, all developments will be done as independent units or plugins while in WordPress 3.8 is targeted for release in December 2013. WordPress 3.8 will be similar to the 3.7 model. Another target is the release of Twenty Fourteen theme before 2014.

Matt also mentioned that there was a 96% attrition rate on those who start a blog and actually follow through (wordpress.com data) – a danger that needs to be addressed. The goal is to improve the numbers by next year in line with democratizing publishing on the web. The success of WordPress lies in the fact that the WordPress community is and has always been actively committed and involved in improving this open source software even after a decade later.

Decoding WordPress Shortcodes

A shortcode is a WordPress-specific code that lets you do nifty things with very little effort. Shortcodes can embed files or create objects that would normally require lots of complicated, ugly code in just one line. Shortcode = shortcut. (WordPress.com)

WordPress shortcodes were introduced in version 2.5.They are a simple set of functions for creating macro codes for use in post content. It enables plugin developers to create special kinds of content (e.g. forms, content generators) that users can attach to certain pages by adding the corresponding shortcode into the page text.

According to WPBeginner,

“…a shortcode is a special tag that you can enter into a post that gets replaced with different content when actually viewing the post on the website.

…a shortcode looks similar to an HTML tag, but is enclosed with square brackets instead of angle brackets. This code gets replaced with some other code when the page is actually loaded in a web browser. The really cool thing is that WordPress allows you to create your own custom shortcodes to display pretty much anything. You could use it to output a Youtube video, show your latest tweets, or even customize it however you like.

An excellent article How to Use Shortcodes in WordPress by Lucy Beer demystifies shortcodes and breaks it down in chewable chunks quite nicely.

Simply put, shortcodes are useful because:

  • shortcodes are easy to use
  • shortcodes are easy to create
  • shortcodes simplify repetitive tasks

Commonly used shortcodes include:

  • buttons
  • content boxes
  • icon lists
  • columns
  • drop caps
  • quotes
  • pricing table
  • author info
  • contact forms
  • tabs

Today, WordPress developers are coming out with simpler and easier to use shortcodes that help even beginners to achieve professional looking websites without touching a single code. These shortcodes allow you to create custom design elements that are unique to your own website without having to use complex coding skills resulting in better looking and functioning websites.

WordPress Themes for Mobile and Tablet

Majority if not all of the recent WordPress theme releases have included responsive design as a staple feature. This ensures that these themes will display well on mobile and handheld devices. Below is a list of WordPress themes that have been created and designed primarily for mobile and handheld devices. These themes are meant to cater to a mobile audience but some of them can also function quite well even on desktop browsers.

Here’s a roundup of the latest WordPress themes for mobile and tablet:

Provocateur°

Provocateur° is a cool and interesting theme built using jQuery Mobile, HTML5 and CSS3, especially for mobile phones and particularly optimized for Apple devices. Main features include a portfolio, a blog, a customizable main page, custom menus and widgets, shortcodes (accordion, portfolio, contact form, tags, YouTube), and even a QR-code sharing option. This theme has a unique slide down menu, email and social networking sharing (twitter & facebook) options, and a changing flip animation.

Touch

Touch is a “lighter than air” WordPress theme that shows power can be packed in a light mobile theme. You get a straightforward blog, an optional static front page, a touch gesture-enabled gallery, a portfolio, a unique comment form along with a validation-enabled contact form, plus sliders, short codes etc. all in one neat, little package. This theme has been thoroughly tested on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, including desktop browsers.

Brave

Brave is an elegant and feature- rich dark theme created for mobile devices. This awesome theme has everything your desktop theme offers and can be used alongside your desktop site. it is ready for localization, can ‘install as web app’ on iOS, contains a beautifully unique menu, comes with comment/contact forms, has a touch/swipe enabled gallery, comes with multiple color schemes, and a variety of extremely customizable short codes to design the mobile website you need.

Resans

Resans is a highly advanced WordPress theme for creatives designed especially for tablets and mobile devices. On larger devices, Resans presents posts on a 4 column grid (Masonry style). As display sizes shrink, the number of columns reduce until a lone column is displayed mobile-style. Resans supports several features such as swipe gestures, responsive layout, 5 page afterload animations, animated loading of new pages, unlimited colors for fonts and backgrounds (header, footer, content, menu), and so much more. Resans can be used alongside with your desktop template and can be set up using Resans AP.

Hero

Hero is a super clean, feature packed WordPress theme built for websites with lot of mobile following. This theme has the power of a regular desktop theme adapted to the smaller devices. Hero gives you impressive blog and portfolio pages similar to a regular desktop version in a more compact form to encourage interaction from your mobile visitors. Theme features include: provisions for two different slider plugins, tons of shortcodes, 9 post formats (Aside, Quote, Image, Video, Audio, Gallery, Status, Link, Chat), translation ready, “install as web app” functionality, and so much more.

Spartan

Spartan is a fully featured WordPress theme for mobile devices created with the goal of being flexible enough to adapt to any and all types of WordPress sites and yet still function as a stand alone theme. One of the many cool features tucked into this theme is the menu that goes beyond just listing a number of links in predetermined styles. This feature allows you to build and color a unique navigation system of your choice. Other cool features include: the comment button that also serves as a visual indicator (grayed out when comments for a given post are disabled, or shaking itself ever so gently to remind the user to read and leave comments when comments are enabled), and also the amount of customization available via shortcodes.

How To Improve Performance On Your WordPress Site

Great content is at the mercy of site speed. No matter how wonderful your content is, taking more than 4 seconds to load can mean significant loss of traffic and loss of potential income for your website. Why? People hate slow websites. The slower it takes for your page to load, the faster people leave it. Patience is not a virtue when it comes to the internet. That is why site speed is important.

Google is obsessed with site speed and has incorporated it as one of the signals for determining search rankings. In a previous article on determining a website’s quality score , we learned that user experience is now a major element and part of the equation in determining and improving your site’s ranking. A fast site creates satisfied users, improves user experience, and improves overall site quality and performance.

If your website is taking longer to load than necessary, it’s time to take stock and audit the elements causing the delay. Here’s a checklist of some of the things you need to consider as you work on improving your site’s performance:

  • Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to load heavy scripts and images and to lighten the load on your server.
  • Optimize caching – Browser caching stores cached versions of static resources. This speeds up page speed tremendously and reduces server lag.
  • Remove/Reduce/Compress large images, videos, and other content. Resize and optimize images for web use. Specify image dimensions and use the right image format.
  • Minify JavaScript and remove unused CSS files. Reduce HTTP loading requests for CSS style sheets, scripts, images, and HTML
  • Remove/Reduce/Deactivate unnecessary or unused widgets or plugins. Plugins and widgets are bandwidth thieves. Try deactivating all of your plugins to test your speed. Activate a widget or a plugin one at a time to see which one is the speed culprit.
  • Check the loading time of your ads or affiliate codes to see how they affect page speed.
  • Check your WordPress theme for compatibility issues with your WordPress version or your browsers.
  • Choose a good web host or switch to a better one with a proven uptime track record if necessary.

Here are some of the tools you can use to help you analyze your site’s performance:

Page Speed

Page Speed evaluates performance from the client point of view, typically measured as the page load time. This is the lapsed time between the moment a user requests a new page and the moment the page is fully rendered by the browser.

Yahoo! YSlow

Firefox/Firebug Add-on that analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance, based on a set of rules for high performance web pages.

Google Analytics Plugin by Yoast

Google Analytics for WordPress plugin allows you to track your blog easily and with lots of metadata: views per author & category, automatic tracking of outbound clicks and page views.

Pingdom Website Speed Test

Pingdom offers cost-effective and reliable server, network and website monitoring. They use a global network of servers to monitor customers’ sites 24/7, all year long. The service includes statistics for uptime and response time, and can send out alerts via SMS, email, and more.

W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is designed to improve user experience and page speed of your site by increasing server performance, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

In conclusion, as far as website essentials go, the adage “less is more” is best. Sticking to only what’s necessary and throwing away what is not needed will help your website float to the top. The faster your website loads, the better your site performs and the experience your users have will be more pleasant, favorable, and hopefully more memorable, making them want to come back for more.

GPL Licensing and WordPress for Normal People

The average WordPress user probably starts off with a simple and very basic desire to set up his/her own website. There are many platforms out there but the platform that most users end up with or choose to use is WordPress. These users either attempt to set up their own website on their own and learn as they go while others hire someone to do it for them. Not many are familiar with the legal or technical aspects surrounding the use of this software but it does not remove the responsibility of finding out the software’s terms, conditions, and proper use. Let’s familiarize ourselves with some of these technical terms. Some of these terms are quoted verbatim to remain true to its original intent.

What is WordPress anyway?

WordPress is a free and open source publishing software and content management system (CMS) with a focus on ease of use, speed and a great user experience. “WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL.

What does free and open source mean?

Open source doesn’t just mean that you can view the source code — it has political and philosophical implications as well. Open source, or “Free Software”, means you are free to modify and redistribute the source code under certain conditions. Free doesn’t refer to the price, it refers to freedom. The difference between the two meanings of free is often characterized as “Free as in speech vs. free as in beer.” The GPL is free as in speech.

“Free software” does not mean “noncommercial”. A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important. You may have paid money to get copies of free software, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies.

GPL or General Public License according to WordPress terms and conditions:

The GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software – to make sure the software is free for all its users. This General Public License applies to most of the Free Software Foundation’s software & to any other program whose authors commit to using it.

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.

To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it. For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.

The reasons for WordPress releasing under the GPL are both practical and idealistic. WordPress was born of the very freedom mentioned earlier. The predecessor to the WordPress project, b2/cafelog, was also an open source project.
(source: WordPress.org/gpl)

What does this mean to the average Joe?

According the GNU.org and its Free Software Definition, you have the freedom:

to run the software for any purpose or any kind of job
to study how the software works, change it and improve it
to redistribute copies in a manner that does not conflict with central freedoms
to redistribute copies of your modified version to benefit the whole community

Split Licenses, the GPL, the Marketplace and the WordPress Foundation

The GPL and WordPress conflict is not new. There have been several occasions before when conflicts of interest have risen between theme providers (ex. Chris Pearson and Matt Mullenweg) and the WordPress Foundation’s interpretation of how the GPL license is applied. The most recent debacle involving Jake Caputo, ThemeForest, and WordPress (resulting in Caputo’s banning from speaking at WordCamps) surfaced earlier this year. Envato and WordPress have been at odds because of the alleged violations of the GPL by the former. Envato claims to be GPL compliant while at the same time been implementing dual-license or split licensing particularly on WordPress themes and plugin. What’s wrong with that?

Here’s a simple analogy to illustrate this.

Choosing a publishing platform is like choosing a car brand. You have several choices: Chevy, Cadillac, a Benz, or a Toyota. Whichever you choose, the technology to create it, the patents, the materials used, and all the basic components like the framework, the engine, the wheels, and everything that makes it run to take you anywhere you want are already built into its system, subject to the manufacturer’s warranty. When it transfers to you, the car manufacturers have no control with what you do with it – use it for business, donate, repaint, etc.

As far as publishing platforms are concerned, you have WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla as the vehicle of your content. In the case of WordPress, the HTML code, the PHP and everything under hood that makes it run are built in and are 100% GPL. When it is transferred to your possession, free or otherwise, you have the freedom to modify, change, sell, copy, distribute, and do whatever you want under the GPL license provided that it retains all those freedoms that you enjoyed when you first got it.

The conflict between Envato and WordPress arose because of the licensing policies of the former, that were not, in the eyes of WordPress, GPL compliant. As far as WordPress is concerned, if your theme is “riding” on the WordPress framework and cannot run independently apart from it, then it inherits and is subject to all the GPL attributes as well.

On the other hand, Envato’s split license states that:

Envato’s marketplace license for themes or plugins sold on the marketplaces covers all the components of these items, except for the specific components covered by the GPL. This is why it’s called a split license: because different license terms can cover individual components that make up a single item.
The PHP component and integrated HTML are covered by the GPL. The rest of the components created by the author (such as the CSS, images, graphics, design, photos, etc) are covered by the marketplace license.

As explained earlier, our license also allows for specific components of an item, which inherit the GPL from the platform they’re built for, to be licensed under the GPL. Using this split license complies with the GPL’s requirements, while still providing protection of the author’s copyright on assets they’ve created.

There are valid points on both sides. Proprietary licensing violates the spirit of the GPL while on the other hand, piracy on the creative output of theme authors are also valid concerns. Conflicts arise to reveal gray areas that need to be dealt with or addressed. Striking a balance between GPL compliance and protecting the creative or intellectual output of theme authors is a tough juggling act. We believe the conversation will still continue.

Update as of February 2013

Envato did a survey about licensing among their users and published the results specifically relating to GPL. They have announced that a 100% GPL option is now available for authors on ThemeForest. Jake Caputo has also posted that he has again been invited to participate in WordCamps.

Useful Articles to Read:

Why WordPress Themes are Derivative of WordPress
WordPress, GPL, and Copyright Case Law
Matt Mullenweg – Q&A – WordPress & GPL
Themes are GPL too

The WordPress Dashboard for WP Beginners

According to the WordPress,

The Dashboard is a tool to quickly access the most used areas of your blog’s Administration and to provide glimpses into other areas of the WordPress community. The Dashboard Screen presents information in blocks called modules. WordPress delivers eight modules: Right Now, Recent Comments, Incoming Links, Plugins,QuickPress, Recent Drafts, WordPress Blog, and Other WordPress News.

The first screen you see when you log into the administration area of your blog is your Dashboard. The main idea of the dashboard is to give you a place where you can get an at-a-glance overview of what’s happening with your blog. You can catch up on news, view your draft posts, see who’s linking to you or how popular your content’s been, quickly put out a no-frills post, or check out and moderate your latest comments.

The Dashboard acts like a cockpit with all the controls and switches you need to help your website function the way you want it to. This might seem basic to those who have been using WordPress for quite some time now but there are still quite a few out there who are still struggling to figure out how to find their way through the backend, scared to death lest they “break” their website beyond repair.

Getting to know your WordPress Dashboard

If you are a WordPress beginner, the Admin Section or backend can be quite intimidating at first, but once you become familiar with the different sections, everything will make sense. What do you see after you successfully login to your WordPress website? Here’s what you can expect.

The Dashboard contains the following default modules. These modules can be dragged, dropped, repositioned, or toggled on and off according to your preferences.

Right Now

This module, at its basic, gives you a concise overview of your what’s going on with your site. It contains information and stats about your content (posts, pages, categories, tags), discussions (approved, pending, or spam comments), the name of your WordPress theme and the number of active widgets you are using, users online, and the WordPress version installed. More information can be included in this module depending on any additional plugins you install. You can also customize your Privacy Settings if you wish to keep your site private.

QuickPress

This module is the best and quickest way you can create a simple post. You can add a title, content, media files, custom forms, tags, and save your post as a draft or publish immediately. It’s a great tool for capturing and publishing ideas without going through the “Add New Post” module.

Recent Comments

If you allow comments on your website, this module helps you moderate the discussions on your posts. You can approve (unapprove), edit, reply, mark as spam, or delete comments right on the dashboard.

Recent Drafts

This module displays saved drafts of posts and pages that you are working on which still needs to be edited or published.

Incoming Links

This module reveals the urls of other websites that has linked to your WordPress website. You may or may not find this module useful as it does not always include all the websites that link to you. You can also configure incoming links you allow by editing the RSS feed information ( url, number of items to display, item date).

What’s Hot

This module displays recent posts from the official WordPress Blog, Other WordPress News, Popular or Latest Posts from around WordPress. This keeps you updated on the latest WordPress related news such as version announcements, security notices, and general WordPress community posts and updates.

Plugins

This module lists the Most Popular, Newest, and Recently Updated plugins available. If you are adventurous and you want to experiment with how different plugins work on your site, this is the perfect resource to find plugins to play with.

Site Stats

This module is probably the one you need to pay most attention to. It shows you a graph of your website’s activities – views, visitors, traffic – per day, week, or month. It’s a great tool to find out how many visits you get, what your top posts are, top searches on your website, and overall statistics to help you improve, maintain, and optimize your site even further.

Knowing the functions of each of these modules will help you learn how to use them to manage your website. Take some time to go through each one of these modules and familiarize yourself with each of them. You’ll soon be mastering all of them and it’ll be instinctive later on.

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”.