Blogger vs WordPress Blog

I started a 'blog' about 7 years ago. Here is the url: https://deardorffdesign.wordpress.com/ Just in the past two years I was invited to join a group of bloggers on this site: https://lutheranladiesconnectionwordpress.wordpress.com/

When I logged into the Lutheran Ladies Connection I used my 'Deardorff Design' log in, since I already had a WordPress log in and password. Now if I try to get back into the dashboard for the Design site it takes me to Lutheran Ladies. I know now that I should have made a new log in, but I can't get into the Design site to change it. Is there anything that I can do? I'd like to change the site, maybe rename it and 're-purpose' it.

The blog I need help with is lutheranladiesconnectionwordpress.wordpress.com.

Source: Split apart two WordPress sites

Do you ever wonder where I learn the blog traffic generation tips I pass on to you?

I read.

I read a book by a blogger who became so successful she monetized.

She discussed milestones you reach as a blogger that relate to page views.

The first milestone, she explained, is when you reach 10,000 page views per month. (Check, I got that!)

The next milestone, she continued, is when you hit 16,000 page views per month.

Well, I'm 3/4 of the way there. I reached over 14,000 page views in March.

That's after only two years of blogging in my niche.

This post, presented in a case study format, will share the traffic generation tips I followed so you can see those kinds of results at your blog as well.

As you can see, in March, I received 14.063 page views to my blog. I averaged 454 page views per day.

Traffic Generation Tips That Work in Any Niche

Let's look at a few screenshots, shall we?

Sunday, March 12

My post, This is How to Rank for Long-Tail Keywords, 5 Free Secret Tips, picked up 258 page views the day it was published.

Tip 1: Use "how to" in your headline. People go to blogs to be empowered. They want to learn how to do something new. Using "how to" in your headline promises they will be able to solve a problem they have by the end of your article.

Tips 2: Offer your readers something "free" and use the word "free" in your headline. "Free" is an effective word to use in a headline since people love to receive free things.

Tip 3: Use the word "secret" in your headline. People love to learn secrets!

Note: Make sure you keep the promises you make in your headline. Otherwise, readers might accuse you of having a "click-bait" headline, a headline that didn't keep its promise in the post.

Tip 4: Backlink to your other, relevant articles. In the keyword post, I linked to my post with related content, 13 Best Free Tools You Need to Improve Your Long-Tail Keywords, which picked up an additional 20 page views that day.

Saturday, March 18

As the screenshot shows, on Saturday, March 18, my article 18 Facebook Groups You Need to Join Today received 541 page views.

The post will go down in the annals of 2017 as my best-performing post of the year. How do I know when the year isn't half over? That's how many page views this post has picked up and continues to pick up.

It is already my seventh best-performing post of all time, and it only just came out two months ago.

Wanting to share my traffic generation tips, I blogged about what I am calling this phenomenon in my post How to Quickly and Easily Write a Viral Blog Post, 12 Ways.

Tip 5: Use "need" in your headline. It denotes urgency.

Tip 6: Use "today" in your headline. It implies there are tips people can follow today. They can favorably control their blog's success on that very day.

Tip 7: You need to fill a need. It will make your blog sticky. People are always looking for new Facebook groups in which to promote their posts.

Monday, March 20

Tip 8: Don't ignore your search engine traffic. Optimize your posts for SEO. I rank in search engines for my Fotor post. As you can see, the article picked up an additional 44 page views on March 20.

Saturday, March 25, 2017

With stats as impressive as 14,063, I feel like this post should offer complex instructions– far from it.

On March 25, I took two actions which resulted in my seeing high page views.

Tip 9: Promote in Facebook groups. There are many Facebook groups that allow daily self-promotion. I promoted my post in those groups.

Tip 10: Hold a Meet and Greet. Everyone loves a party! As you can see by the screenshot, I held a Meet and Greet which is a blog party. Blog parties give bloggers a chance to grow their communities. Both of these actions, conscious choices on my part, resulted in high stats that day.

I say this since many bloggers think luck results in high page views. This wasn't luck. These actions were deliberate on my part after much forethought.

Sunday, March 26

Okay, so there is a lot to see in the screenshot:

According to WordPress, Sunday is my best day of the week for page views.

Is it yours, too? I ask since on weekends your page views will be the best. Therefore, if you have any "heavy hitters," posts you predict will send your page views through the roof, publish them on weekends.

Tip 11: Publish your post on the day of the week you receive the highest page views. I published on my best day of the week, a Sunday.

My guest author's article, 7 Best Blog Posts That Will Make People Subscribe in 2017, was not supposed to be published this soon. When the guest author sent me the post, I explained I had a four-month waiting list for me to publish guest posts since I normally only publish guest posts on Tuesdays.

So, why did I let this particular guest author jump the queue and be published immediately? Will you humor me? Come on, look at the headline and make a prediction. (I am playing teacher here, I admit it.)

As you see, the post did well. The article received 268 page views the day it published. Try to analyze the factors that made this post a hit.

Did you guess? Look at the last 4 digits. I read a secret tip. As my long-standing readers know, I love secret tips!

Tip 12: Add the current year to your blog headlines. (Isn't this easy? It's so easy, it's downright fun.)

I read if the headline has the current year in it, it will receive high page views. Readers want to know what is popular this year, what is trendy this year, and so forth.

Since the first quarter of 2017 is already over, I published this post almost immediately. I couldn't bump people I already promised a date. That would be rude. Therefore, I published on the weekend when I normally write.

Tip 13: Put a number in your headline. I have two numbers in my headline– 7 and 2017. Odd numbers do better than even and prime numbers do best. Sure enough, 7 is a prime number.

Did you notice a post with another prime number picked up page views this day? 79 of the Most Effective Ways to Get Free Blog Traffic is over a year old, and it picked up 20 page views that day!

Did you also notice this headline? I have two numbers in my headline. 17 is an odd number and a prime number, and 14,063 is an odd number.

Tip 14: Have a Meet and Greet on a Saturday. Continue to promote it on Sunday. Can you tell from the screenshot on Sunday it picked up an additional 81 page views? It was easy to witness this kind of traffic generation. I wrote a few sentences inviting people to promote their blogs and leave a link in the comment section. It took mere minutes!

Tip 15: Have a linky party. The Blogger's Pit Stop Linky Party published four days prior and still picked up an additional 38 page views!

Tip 16: Promote at Flipboard. I know bloggers who have seen their traffic increase by 10 times by promoting at Flipboard.

Tip 17: Have other people stumble your links. That's the way to see more traffic from StumbleUpon. As you can see from the screenshot, StumbleUpon sent me 40 page views that day! (Note: Mostly Blogging has a StumbleUpon group if you'd like us to stumble your pages for you.)

Conclusion: One Last Traffic Generation Tip

In conclusion, there is an additional traffic generation tip that applies on every day across the board:

As my post about how to have a successful blog explains, you need to work hard.

Even on holidays work hard. You will beat the competition. Your post will live on in search so people can find your article when it's not a holiday.

Also, people might be home to read your post on holidays.

I have often read blogging is an activity we do rain and shine, day and night. I am adding: in addition to those times, even on holidays, work hard. Enjoy the blogging, but do your best. Your readers deserve it, and you deserve to be proud of your legacy– your blog posts.

You can see from reading this post, high page views are within your control. Follow the traffic generation tips I shared in this post. Take the actions I took. Then, watch, and you will see high page views at your blog too.

(Note: If anyone would like one-on-one help boosting page views, my Traffic Generation service is offered at a discount for subscribers of this blog.)

Readers, please share so other bloggers learn these traffic generation tips too.

Are there any additional traffic generation tips you can recommend? Are there any new ideas from this post you are going to try? I look forward to your views in the comments section.

Related Posts:

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Source: 17 Easy Blog Traffic Generation Tips That Will Make You See 14,063 Page Views

The Best of WordPress.com in April

The 2017 default theme is here, plus: inclusive design, editing tools, Swag Store, and must-follow sites.

You're off to a strong creative start in 2017! Here are a few recent updates and stories from the WordPress.com community in April that we wanted to share with you.

This Year's WordPress Default Theme, Twenty Seventeen, Is Now Available

"Great looking theme!" – Jason Thornberry

Independent Publisher 2 Is Here

The Independent Publisher theme has long been beloved for its simplicity and legibility, and we're happy to announce that it has been improved, ever so slightly. Read our interview with the designers, Caroline Moore and Kjell Reigstad.

Check Out the New Look, Products, and Features of the WordPress Swag Store

For a chance to be featured on the website, post WordPress swag pics to Twitter and Instagram using #WPSWAG. Use code WPSWAG for 20% off all items. (Offer ends May 12.)

Longreads Just Turned 8 Years Old. Here's What the Next Eight Years Look Like

Longreads is rapidly becoming the best place on the internet for personal essays, and there are ambitious plans to do even more. Read more on our plans, and contribute to the Longreads story fund — WordPress.com will even match your contributions.

Better conceptualizing, designing, building, and improving how to meet the needs of underserved users is a core part of how we work at WordPress.com, and that was the focus of April's Design and Exclusion (#DesignX) conference (check out the complete video and transcript at x.design.blog).

How can we help entrepreneurs working in cities around the world? That's the challenge Hajj Flemings explored in an April essay for Design.blog. He shares some of the insights which came out of the 100 Project Hackathon — a project tasked to build nine small business sites in a 48-hour period in Detroit.

Perspectives: 'But Wait, Is Your Last Name Filipino?' (Samantha Hankins)

10,000 Kilometers: Quintin Lake on Walking and Photographing Britain's Coastline

Two Aprils ago, Quintin Lake set off from St. Paul's Cathedral in London. The journey? To walk 10,000 kilometers around the coast of Britain. We caught Quintin just before he embarked on a 15-day adventure around the edge of Snowdonia, North Wales. Read about Quintin's epic walk along the sea.

Quotables: "If you really love writing, it's like eating. You can't live without doing it." – The writing life of Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore (Harvard Gazette).

Case Study: A collection of portraits, street scenes, and details from Bangkok.

Try it out: Importing Google Docs → WordPress.com.

Now following

"WordPress was the best… I'm very happy to be back." — welcome back, Leo Laporte!

Check out Amazon CTO Werner Vogels's new site, Werner.blog.

Hang out with us on Instagram and tag your 'grams with #DiscoverWP.

That's all for now!

What did you love about your own work in April? Comment with a link to a post you're proud of, or something new you learned about designing your site. Feeling motivated? Download the WordPress app on iOS and Android.

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Source: The Best of WordPress.com in April

Liz, I forgot to mention: I'll be away from May 1 to 19, so you're probably at least guaranteed I won't be asking again till then or later. :-) (You probably see me going on for a looooong time further revising the text I have on HOME and ABOUT. Allan (What's the Icon for "Heart?")

Source: Allan Avery - new WordPress Blog

So, you have installed WordPress on your server, and everything looks good. But how do you use WordPress?

To start using WordPress, you need to log into the admin section of your website. This section includes all the features and options to manage the website. Go to this address to access the admin area –

www.yoursite.com/wp-admin

Obviously, you need to change www.yoursite.com with your domain name. Provide the username, password, and click "Log In." This will take you to a page like this –

This is your dashboard. You will perform all the website management tasks from the dashboard. Let's get started with the posts.

Managing the Posts

Publishing new posts is the most performed task on any WordPress blog. To publish a new post, go to Posts > Add New. The page looks like the following –

As you can see, the layout is divided into two columns. The left column is for providing the title and main content of the post. There are lots of formatting options for the content. You can apply various styles like bold, italic, strike-through, bullet or numbered lists, alignment, indenting, quote, etc. It is also possible to set up various heading tags and add links to your content.

You can add images by clicking the "Add Media" button. I will discuss more about uploading images shortly. Once the media files are uploaded, you can add these to your post. You will find separate options to define the title, caption, alt, description, alignment, link, and size of the image.

The right column enables you to set up other necessary options for the post. In the "Publish" section, you can save the post as a draft, check out the preview, or publish the post.

You can choose the post type in the "Format" section. In "Categories," you can choose the category for the post. It is also possible to create a new category from there. The next section is for assigning tags to the post.

Lastly, the "Featured Image" is for setting up an image that will be displayed along with the post on the blog, archive, and other places.

You will find a list of all the posts at Posts > All Posts. From that page, you can edit, view, or delete the posts on your website.

Dealing with the Pages

WordPress pages work in almost the similar way as the posts. To add a new page, you have to go to Pages > Add New. The interface looks almost identical to adding a new post.

The left column is for the title and content. You will find all the formatting and media options like adding a new post. On the right column, you will find the familiar publish and featured image sections.

Handling Media Files

WordPress comes with simple ways to upload and manage media files. To upload a new media file, go to Media > Add New. On the resulting page, click the "Select Files" button, and choose your desired files.

You can find all the media files at the Media > Library page. It is possible to view, edit, or delete any image from the media library. You will also find detailed information and separate fields for setting up the title, caption, alt, description, etc. for each image.

As your website grows, you will get more visitors, and some of them will leave comments. Click the "Comments" menu to check out all the comments. The comments are divided into separate types like the pending, approved, spam, and trash.

For each comment, you can check out the commenter name, email address, URL, the relevant post, date, time, and the comment itself. You will also find separate links to reply, edit, trash, or mark the comment as spam.

You need to set up at least one navigation menu for your website. You can do that from the Appearance > Menus page. This takes you to a page like the following –

Click the "create a new menu" link, and provide a name for the menu. Next, you need to add menu items to the menu. You can add any of your posts, pages, categories, or any custom link to the menu. Make sure that you are choosing the desired location for the menu.

Lastly, click the "Save Menu" button to save the changes.

Managing Themes

The wide availability of themes is a notable feature of WordPress. You can use a theme to create the basic structure of your website with a few clicks.

WordPress comes with a few default themes. Feel free to check out these themes in the Appearance > Themes page. The currently activated theme will be specially highlighted. You can activate any other theme you want. To do that, hover over the theme, and click the "Activate" button.

You can add new themes too. If you want to install any of the free themes available in the WordPress theme directory, click the "Add New" button. The next page will show a list of the featured themes. There is a search field to help you find the desired theme. Once you have found the theme, hover over the theme and click "Install."

It is also possible to install themes from other sources. To do that, click the "Upload Theme" button and upload the zip file of the theme. Once the theme is uploaded, install and activate it by following the same steps described above.

Using Plugins

Plugins make it very simple to add new features and improve the performance of your website. Every new WordPress installation comes with a few default plugins. You can activate, deactivate, or delete the plugins depending on your requirements.

Click the "Add New" button to add a new plugin. You can install any of the free plugins available at the official plugin directory, or upload a third-party plugin. The upload process is the same as uploading a new theme.

Handling the Users

Do you remember that you created a new user when installing WordPress? You will find that user and all the other users you create in the future in the Users > All Users page. The page will display the name, username, email address, role, and the number of posts for each user.

To create a new user, go to Users > Add New. The page looks like the following –

You will find separate fields for providing the username, email address, website, first and last name, password, and defining the user role. After you have provided the necessary information, click the "Add New User" button.

Setting Up Your Website

As you can guess, the "Setting" menu includes all the settings options for your website. In the "General Settings" page, you can define the website title, tagline, admin email address, timezone, time and date formats.

"Reading" is another important settings page. In this page, you can choose how the front page is displayed. You can choose to show the latest posts on the homepage, or set separate pages for the front and blog pages. There's another option for defining how many posts should be displayed on the blog page.

Lastly, the "Permalinks" page enables you to choose the default URL structure for your content.

Final Words

And that's how you use WordPress on a day-to-day basis. It may seem a lot for beginners, but give it some time, and you will get used to all these steps. After all, these are only the basics of WordPress. You can do a lot more with this powerful website creation platform.

So, did this article help you understand the basics of WordPress? Are you confident about using WordPress now? Let me know in the comments.

Source: How To Use WordPress - Beginners Guide

Determining whether or not to use WordPress Multisite can be a confusing choice. Should you develop multiple sites under a single installation, or keep each separate? Depending on the scenario, WordPress Multisite can be an extremely beneficial solution. Yet, there are some instances where it is not so much of a good fit.

Trying to decide on whether or not WordPress Multisite is the way to go? Read on for several examples of notable brands implementing this technology in the wild today. But first, let's dig deeper into what a multisite network actually is.

What is WordPress Multisite?

Originally called WordPress MU, this feature was envisioned to enable blogging networks. In 2010, WordPress Multisite replaced WordPress MU. Multisite offers a lot more than MU, with sites ranging beyond blogs to include corporate sites, internal networks, and more.

With Multisite, there is one host, one install of WordPress, and many sites. It's like an apartment complex with a shared roof (hosting), common spaces (filesystems), and many private apartments (sites). If you're looking to dig deeper into the technicalities of this solution, see our beginner's guide to WordPress Multisite to get the 411.

Let's now take a look at some real-life examples of notable brands implementing this technology today.

The University of Texas at Austin

You'll hear it over and over again…WordPress Multisite is great for universities. And it's true! The University of Texas, for example, allows its faculty, staff, and students to create their own site within the network that can easily be self-serviced.

Teachers can create and put their curriculum on a site within the network, making it easy for students to access collateral. If a student wants to create a site for a club, sports team, or personal site, they can do so within the school's multisite network as well.

UT ultimately has control into what goes into the network, providing six accessible themes to use, as well as a structured web domain.

Best Buy

Believe it or not, Best Buy has an individual website for each and every one of its 1,000-plus stores. WordPress Multisite becomes a huge helper in this instance, storing each site under a single WordPress installation. Each store can then individually host its own customer ratings, current inventory, upcoming sales, and more.

WordPress.com

Not to be confused with WordPress.org, this is possibly one of the best examples of a notable brand using WordPress Multisite. Anyone can go to WordPress.com and start a personal blog — once that blog is activated, it is then added to WordPress' Multisite network.

Currently, there are more than 409 million people who view over 15.5 billion pages each month within WordPress.com's Multisite network.

The New York Times

Another great application of WordPress Multisite is in the publishing industry. The New York Times enables Multisite for its writers, allowing them to manage individual columns. This gives great agility to its writers and editors who can publish content immediately as they write breaking news stories.

Cheapflights

So far we've covered education, retail, self-publishing, and news publishing brands who use a multisite network to help achieve flexibility and publishing control with their online presence.

Self-service and travel tool Cheapflights.com also uses WordPress Multisite for its geo-centric locations across the globe, including news.cheapflights.com and news.cheapflights.co.uk.

Rather than setting up a new WordPress site each time, when setting up a new region site, it can be done through the multisite network. This allows the new site to have the same look and structure, yet gives the site owner control over the content that focuses on the region's specific needs.

Final Thoughts

While WordPress Multisite is not for everyone, there are some great use cases for it. You can allow users to create their own site with some constraints, as well as centrally manage each individual site from an admin role. Multisite is probably not a good idea, however, if you want a lot of different content and you want all of your sites to look different.

Want to know more? Check out this white paper for some additional insights:Best Friend or Worst Enemy? The Do's and Don'ts of WordPress Multisite

Source: 5 Examples Of Brands Using WordPress Multisite Today

Hi, I'm trying to import my livejournal blog to my blog here on wordpress. I've found the tool and everything, but when I enter my livejournal data, I keep running into an error that says: 'Logging in to LiveJournal failed. Check your username and password and try again.'. The username and password are 100% correct, though. I logged out and back in on livejournal, just to make sure I haven't changed the password lately and forgotten about it, but I haven't. I've also re-entered the information from scratch three times to make sure that there aren't any typos. What else can I do to make the importing work? Please help me out with this. Thanks a lot. Best of wishes, Tanja

The blog I need help with is theauthorsparadise.wordpress.com.

Source: Blog import

In this step by step guide, we will prove you how to update WordPress plugins, and how to manage WP plugin updates more efficiently.

After you start your blog and install plugins, it's exceedingly important for security reasons that you keep the plugins updated.

Why We Update Our WordPress Plugins?

WordPress plugins are similar apps for your WordPress website.

You can install them to add new features and functionality to your website like adding contact forms, picture galleries, sliders, etc.

You can find out more about WordPress plugins in our guide what are WordPress plugins?

How exactly do they work?.

Plugins are created by third-party developers.

Most of them keep improving their plugins by adding new features, improving code quality, and holding them secure.

These changes are then published as updates.

You should always maintain your WordPress site plugins up to date to ensure that those changes are applied to your site immediately.

This improves WordPress security and performance of your site.

Having said that, let's find out how to update WordPress plugins.

WordPress comes with a built-in plugins update system.

It automatically checks for WordPress updates and shows you notifications when there are updates available for your WordPress plugins, themes, and WordPress core software.

You can manually checks for plugin updates by just visiting Dashboard » Updates page.

When there is a new update available for plugins, you will understand the notification on the plugins menu in the WordPress admin bar.

You can set up these updates by visiting the Plugins page.

You will see a notice below each plugin that has updates available for you to install.

You can simply click on the 'Update Now' link to install each update.

Update WordPress Plugins:

If there are updates for several WordPress plugins for your website, and so you may want to quickly review and bulk update those plugins.

To do that, you just need to visit the WP Plugins page and click on the 'Update Available' link.

This will depict you the list of all plugins that have updates available.

You can pick out all of them and then select 'Update' from the 'Bulk Actions' drop down menu.

Before You, Update Plugins Must Read this!

Before you update the plugin, it's important that you click on the View version details link to understand what changes the plugin author has made.

This will keep you informed as to what changes were prepared should anything not work properly.

Unless the version details specifically say security update, we usually wait one full week before updating the plugin.

At this time, all errors usually get caught, reported, and geared up.

If you bear a heavy traffic site that is generating a lot of leads, then we recommend you to do the same.

How to Undo Plugin Update

Sometimes a plugin update can produce unexpected results like some plugin features may not function properly.

In that case, the very first thing, you will need to deactivate that specific plugin.

If you can access the Plugins page in the WordPress admin area, then just simply click on the 'Deactivate Plugin' link below the misbehaving plugin.

After all that, you can set up the WP-Rollback WordPress plugin.

For more details, see our step by step guide on how to set up a WordPress plugin. 

After activation, the plugin, go back to the Plugins page, and you will be able to experience a rollback option below each plugin.

Clicking on it will let you to rollback the plugin to any previous version.

If you are unable to access the WordPress admin area, then adopt the steps in our guide on how to deactivate all the WordPress plugins when not able to access WordPress admin area.

Tips To Manage WordPress Plugins

If you manage multiple WordPress sites, then you will soon understand that you have to update plugins quite often.

Here are some tips to help you do them more efficiently.

If you are positive about the plugins that you are using, then you can enable automatic updates for all your WordPress plugins.

However, a better approach will be to setup automatic updates just for select few plugins that you trust.

Follow the above instructions in our guide on how to better manage the WordPress updates.

If you don't manage multiple WordPress sites, then you can setup email notifications for plugin updates.

This will leave you to be alerted when there is an update available without logging into your WordPress Blog/Website.

Always make sure that you have set up an automatic backup plugin on your WordPress website.

This will allow you to restore your WordPress site in case something gets wrong.

Last but not least, if you can afford managed WordPress hosting, then the staging website feature is decidedly worth the investment.

It allows you to try out the new plugin updates on a staging environment before going live.

We recommend using either WPEngine or SiteGround's Go Geeks plan.

We hope this article helped you to learn how to completely update WordPress plugins.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress, Blogging & SEO video tutorials. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter.

I'm wishing you the best of luck!

Get started on WordPress today and start turning your spare time into spare cash.

Don't forget to share this article with your friends.

Best of luck and have a great flight!

Source: (Step by Step) How To Update WordPress Plugins

WordPress was composed basically to be utilized as a blogging stage, yet it is likewise a capable site content-administration framework. Here are 10 reasons it works for business. While "free" is not generally the best business arrangement, WordPress is entrenched.

WordPress.org can serve clients at all value focuses from the individuals who need to begin with a free subject that they introduce themselves, to those with more particular needs who can enlist a website specialist to make a custom topic that coordinates with their webpage and backings their marking. From the beginning, the main cost will be the cost of facilitating your site.

Various individuals at your organization can have admittance to refresh your site or blog. Wordpress has center part base administration and you can expand it as the need emerges for you and your association. You can set authorization levels of every client to keep up the security and trustworthiness of your site or blog.

However a large group of free online WordPress assets as news directory, on the off chance that you essentially can't discover what you're searching for or don't have sufficient energy to deal with something exceedingly tweaked for your website, it's anything but difficult to discover WordPress designers for contract.

On the off chance that you choose to utilize the self-facilitated variant of WordPress, there is greater adaptability as far as components and outline. In the event that you need to host it you have the capacity, yet in the event that your organization is not there yet you can control WordPress to fit your image and your needs.

1. WordPress is open source.

Why ought to that matter for your business? Open source implies that the innovation that forces WordPress is straightforward for simpler improvement. Therefore there are individuals everywhere throughout the world growing new subjects and modules to impart to different WordPress clients.

With other blogging projects, for example, TypePad, clients need to take in a particular programming dialect to utilize it. Portable Type can be awkward for non-nerd clients.

2. WordPress is upgraded for SEO.

When constructing any site or blog that is gone for a wide crowd, site design improvement (SEO) is vital. WordPress has SEO benefits worked in. "WordPress locales have a tendency to improve in the web indexes and rank well rapidly," said Wilber.

"I have had a few destinations that inside days of setting the site up with watchword neighborly area names that are positioning on the main page for that catchphrase."

3. WordPress is anything but difficult to refresh.

One of the significant grumblings of entrepreneurs is that they can't refresh their site themselves, and that having another person refresh it costs them cash. "Not exclusively is WordPress free it is easy to introduce," said Armeda.

"It takes close to five minutes to set up the product." Once WordPress is set up you can undoubtedly refresh content or make new pages without knowing HTML.

4. WordPress has a large number of expansions .

There is a substantial group of WordPress designers who make free subjects, gadgets and modules. There are augmentations for surveying, contact frames, moving down your site, blocking spam, making your pages stack quicker and thousands progressively that can be found on the WordPress Plugin Directory. From that point, you add the new components to your site or blog without hiring a web engineer.

WordPress clients and engineers have online bolster organizes on different gatherings. What's more, all through the world, WordCamp meetings are held to discuss everything WordPress. Users additionally post well-ordered video instructional exercises that can walk new clients through the most essential and in addition complex ideas.

Get free real-time news alerts from the Altadena Patch.

This post is contributed by a community member. The views expressed in this post are the author's. Registered users are welcome to post on Patch.
Source: Benefits of choosing WordPress for your business directory

Checathlon is new business theme on WordPress.org that was designed to seamlessly integrate with Easy Digital Downloads. The name is a combination of the words checkout and decathlon, according to its creator Sami Keijonen.

Checathlon combines elegant typography with a bold, pink accent color to showcase products and services on a business or e-commerce website. The theme was designed by Finnish designer Toni Suni and is Keijonen's 13th theme to be listed in the directory.

"I had some kind of vision of what I wanted and Toni created a pixel perfect design based on our discussion," Keijonen said. "I'm super happy about the end result. Unfortunately, the design and the theme was not good enough for WordPress.com and the theme was rejected from there." Keijonen opted to create a Checathlon Plus plugin as an alternative way to monetize the theme.

Checathlon has an intuitive way of organizing the content featured on the front page. Unlike many other themes, the front page is not controlled by a custom page template. Once you set the front page as a static page, the Customizer will give access to the service/pricing, products, testimonial, and blog sections.

The theme includes support for a Pricing page template and a Team Page template. These features make Checathlon more flexible for use on a business, agency, non-profit, or e-commerce website.

The pricing template has a "Service and Pricing widget" area where users can drop in the custom widgets available in the Checathlon Plus plugin. The widgets make it easy for users to set an icon, title, content, price, and a link for each pricing tier, as well as the ability to highlight one tier as featured.

Checathlon was built to support several plugins, including Easy Digital Downloads, Custom Content Portfolio, and Jetpack (testimonials and portfolio). The theme includes styles for the Jetpack email subscription widget and EDD downloads and account pages. It's also tagged as accessibility-ready, which means that it has successfully passed an accessibility audit. Check out the live demo to see Checathlon in action.

Keijonen is taking a unique approach by creating a Checathlon Plus plugin as an alternative to offering a "pro version" of the theme. It extends the theme to include more customizer capabilities, additional widgets, cart customization features for EDD, and two child themes. The free theme is available on WordPress.org and documentation can be found on the theme's website.

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Source: Checathlon: A Free WordPress Business Theme with Support for Easy Digital Downloads

This article is part of a series created in partnership with SiteGround. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

When discussing WordPress, and specifically the development of themes (or creating new page templates inside an existing theme) you inevitably will run up against "The Loop". The Loop is the framework within which WordPress constructs the content for any given page that user visits, whether that be a static home page or a blog view showcasing recent posts, or anything in between. It may sound a bit complex, but really, it's just a looping mechanism.

The Loop, at its simplest, is a looping structure just like any other in programming. It iterates through what amounts to a list of all of your site's content, cycling through your posts or pages, and fetching the requested content from them. At its most complicated, you can run The Loop multiple times, fetch only certain items from certain categories, only items not in certain categories, those published within a date range, or with other particular identifying information.

Every page template within a WordPress theme will likely contain The Loop. It's one way that the template can search for and acquire content from your pages and posts, which are stored in the database. Let's take a look at some specifics:

A Basic Example of the Loop <?php if ( have_posts() ) { while ( have_posts() ) { the_post(); // Post Content here } } ?>

You can see in the above example that it's really a pretty straightforward setup. The entire thing starts with a conditional, with have_posts checking to ensure that there are, in fact, any posts to find. Then the loop happens – while there are still posts (again using have_posts), it iterates through the next post and calls up the_post – which refers to the one currently being iterated through.

Particular Queries

If your needs are more advanced than simply returning every post that there is on your website, you'll need to limit your queries. This is where WP_Query comes into play.

Filtering by Category

In the below example, modified from an example in the Codex, we will query for posts that are in the category which has the id of 4. Then, you can see a sample of the contents of the loop itself. Here, we check for posts with a category ID of 4, then, within the .post div, we display the post's title (linked to the post), the date of the post, the post's content, and the post's metadata.

<!-- Query for posts which are in category 4 --> <?php $query = new WP_Query( array( 'cat' => 4 ) ); ?> <!-- Begin The Loop --> <?php if ( $query->have_posts() ) { while ( $query->have_posts() ) { $query->the_post(); ?> <div class="post"> <!-- Display the Title as a link to the Post's permalink. --> <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2> <!-- Display the date (November 16th, 2009 format) and a link to other posts by this posts author. --> <small><?php the_time( 'F jS, Y' ); ?> by <?php the_author_posts_link(); ?></small> <!-- Display the post content --> <div class="entry"> <?php the_content(); ?> </div> <!-- Display the post metadata --> <p class="postmetadata"><?php _e( 'Posted in' ); ?> <?php the_category( ', ' ); ?></p> </div> } }

The use of WP_Query can lead to some very customizable results. You can include posts of only one category, or several, or include all except for those from one category or another. You can search and return posts that contain a keyword, or locate posts by ID, use the post_type to show only data from pages, and more. If you want to learn in more depth about WP_Query, take a look at the WP_Query documentation.

Tip: You can get the ID number of a category in several ways. One easy way is to head over to "Posts", then "Categories" in your WP-Admin. Right click on the desired category name in the list, and save the URL. Then paste it in a text editor or notepad somewhere and take a look. As an example, it might look something like this: http://example.com/wp-admin/term.php?taxonomy=category&tag_ID=4&post_type=post&wp_http_referer=%2Fwp-admin%2Fedit-tags.php%3Ftaxonomy%3Dcategory – you're looking for the tag_ID number!

Filtering by Custom Field Values

The custom fields that are available in WordPress can be fantastically useful, and you may at times also need to filter posts by the values set in those as well. A simple task, but it's worth showing for beginning WordPress developers (or those who haven't delved far into custom templates or The Loop) to realize how customizable all of this is. Say that you have a custom field department and you're looking for posts with the value marketing:

$query = new WP_Query( array('meta_key' => 'department', 'meta_value' => 'marketing') ); Understanding "The Loop"

The truely best way to understand The Loop is simply to use it. Use it to fetch your content in the templates you create for themes, or in the code that you customize in existing templates in existing themes. When you want to do something, filter for certain criteria, run The Loop again – check the The Loop documentation in the Codex, or hit up Google for ideas. The sky's the limit!

If you're looking for somewhere to host your WordPress site after you've got your templates built and The Loop all figured out, take a look at our partner, SiteGround. They have affordable WordPress hosting available, with one click installation, staging environments, and more!

Source: Understanding "The Loop" in WordPress

Elegant Themes has been developing WordPress themes for a long time. It has developed lots of popular themes including Divi, Nexus, Fable, and Extra. If you have always wanted to know more about this company, this in-depth review will answer all of your questions.

Throughout the following sections, I will introduce you to the themes and plugins offered by Elegant Themes, how they provide customer service and share the pricing plans too.

Let's get started with a short history of the company.

What is Elegant Themes?

Elegant Themes is one of the leading WordPress theme developers right now. Nick Roach started the company 8 years ago. Since then, it has grown up to acquire 400,000+ customers with 50+ team members.

At the time of writing this review, Elegant Themes offers 87 themes and 5 plugins. Continue reading to know more about these products.

WordPress Themes by Elegant Themes

As you can guess from the name, the company started with WordPress themes. Over time, it released a large number of themes. While it's not possible to cover all the themes in a single post, let's check out the most popular ones. We will start with Divi.

Divi

Divi is the flagship product of Elegant Themes. This incredibly popular multi-purpose theme allows you to create any type of website you want. It is powered by Divi Builder, a highly powerful page builder plugin which we will discuss shortly.

When using Divi, you will have a whole new experience in creating page layouts. You can get started with any of the 20+ readymade layouts, or create your own layout from scratch. Thanks to the intuitive WYSIWYG editor, it is possible to design your content both on the back-end and front-end.

Similar to any other premium theme, Divi also comes with a wide range of professionally designed demos. Use the one-click demo importer to start your website with any of these demos. The customizer section includes all the styling options you need.

Divi is already translated into 32 languages, including several RTL languages as well. The SEO-friendly theme is certified by Sucuri.net for its strong security features.

Extra

Extra is a feature-rich magazine theme that allows you to create news, magazine, fashion, lifestyle, or other relevant websites. The gorgeous blog layouts of the theme can play crucial roles in drawing the attention of your visitors. Various post formats will allow you to publish different types of content.

This theme is also powered by the Divi builder, which means you will enjoy all the benefits like the front-end editor, professional layouts, and special builder elements. What's more, Extra also allows you to use the builder elements on the category pages.

The integrated review and rating systems will enable you to publish in-depth reviews of your favorite products or services. It is possible to allow the visitors to submit their own reviews. The WooCommerce-supported theme also offers the fully featured customizer section, custom widgets, and the mobile-optimized coding.

Other Themes

Elegant Themes also offers lots of other themes. You can choose themes like Nexus, Fable, Nimbus, Vertex, StyleShop, Fusion, etc. for creating a business, e-commerce, portfolio, blog, magazine, and multimedia websites.

WordPress Plugins by Elegant Themes

Despite the name, Elegant Themes has developed several highly popular plugins as well. Let's take a closer look at these plugins.

Bloom

Bloom is a fully featured lead generation plugin for collecting email subscribers from your website. The plugin allows you to show opt-in boxes on all important locations including the traditional pop-up, fly-ins on different corners, inline, below content, the widgetized sections, content locker, etc.

The plugin supports 16 email marketing platforms including the common names like MailChimp, AWeber, Constant Contact, Mad Mini, Campaign Monitor, etc. There are more than 100 professionally designed opt-in templates to help you get started. It is also possible to customize any of these templates or create your own design.

Bloom also comes with a set of targeted display options. These features will make sure that the opt-ins are reaching the target visitors. The dashboard offers detailed statistics about the performance of your opt-ins. The fully responsive plugin also supports A/B testing.

Monarch

Social media integration is a must for any modern website. With support for more than 35 social media networks, Monarch could be an excellent choice in this case. While the plugin supports all the strategic locations, the custom widgets and dedicated shortcodes allow you to show the social sharing buttons anywhere you want.

You can use any of the available triggers to show the buttons at a precise moment. The plugin makes it very simple to customize the social sharing buttons. You can choose any of the three button shapes, nine hover effects, six icon orientations, and use unlimited colors.

Thanks to the highly optimized coding, the fully responsive sharing buttons will not have any impact on the page loading speed. You will find detailed sharing metrics at the plugin's dashboard.

Divi Builder

Divi Builder is an intuitive page builder plugin that allows you to create any type of layout for your posts and pages. There are 46 content modules to help you create the proper layout for different types of websites.

The plugin comes with several ready-made layouts to help you get started as quickly as possible. It is also possible to create your own column-based layout. The advanced design options enable you to control the font, color, background, margin, padding, and all other styling options for the individual element, row, and section.

The unlimited number of undo and redo actions is a notable feature of Divi Builder. What's more, you can save the customized layouts in the integrated builder library. It is possible to import and export the library items as well.

Elegant Themes Support

Premium members can get the necessary support in different ways. First of all, there are detailed documentations for each theme and plugin. The step-by-step instruction is accompanied by lots of relevant images and videos.

In case the documentation isn't enough for you, there is a dedicated support forum to get expert help for your specific problems. You can search the existing questions, browse the threads, or create a new ticket. There are dedicated forum sections for the popular themes and plugins.

Pricing

Elegant Themes has two pricing plans –

Yearly Access: Priced at $89 per year, this plan offers unlimited access to all the themes, plugins for unlimited websites. The plan also includes premium support.

Lifetime Access: This plan allows you to enjoy all the benefits of yearly access for a lifetime. You can get this plan for a one-time payment of $249.

Final Words

Elegant Themes is one of the few brands which have held their attention exclusively on WordPress. The rapidly growing number of customers is a strong indicator of their reliable products and customer service. Now that you have read the review, you know the exact behind the incredible popularity of the company.

So, have you ever had a chance to use any of Elegant Themes' products? Or maybe you are planning to do so in the future. Whatever it is, let me know your thoughts about the company by leaving a comment below.

Source: Elegant Themes Review – Best WordPress Theme Club?