WordPress is by default a blogging platform. It was designed as a platform for blogging, however you do not need to utilize it as such. It is the world’s most popular site and blogging CMS tool.

WordPress is an easy content management system, or what is known as an individual publishing system. It is an amazingly powerful content management system. It is the most extensively used open source management system online today and for great reason. It is an open source software, implying it is free for the public to download, set up, use, and enhance. It is an application powered by PHP and MySQL which can likewise be used for basic content management.

It is also an extremely powerful platform that can help you run your website. It is a personal publishing platform which concentrates on visual appeals, Web standards, and use. WordPress is the world’s most popular publishing platforms, and it currently powers 17.6 % of all sites.

As an Open Source project, there are hundreds of people developing it ongoingly. It has a comprehensive variety of free and paid plugins to add greater useability and functionality to your internet site. WordPress is updated regularly, with new functionality, bug fixes, and safety fixes.

WordPress is not without defects, though. It has a special function called WordPress multisite. It has a great feature called shortcodes. It has included a brand-new feature called Tags. WordPress is flexible, rapid and very user friendly.

WordPress requires minimal knowledge of the inner workings of the Net. WordPress is easy and at the exact same time loaded with numerous attributes with its roots and advancement going back to 2001. It has been around since 2003. WordPress will alert you when updates are readily available for the system and your plugins.

WordPress is entirely adjustable and can be used for practically anything.

Plugins

Plugins are pieces of software application or apps that assist to extended the functionality of your WordPress created internet site or blog site and can do practically every little thing you can think of. There are countless complimentary plugins offered to the user varying from video players, xml site map creators, SEO to complimentary repayment gateways. All of the available plugins have been established for use with by a 3rd party and are offered for free (some would like you to make a small donation but it is not necessary) or for a small financial cost you can buy the upmarket variation.

Plugins are set up into the WordPress CMS by means of the administration area of your website. This feature is not readily available to WordPress accounts created via WordPress.com so be careful when choosing your platform.

Themes

Themes are essentially what provides your WordPress internet site its feel and look. There are thousands of free WordPress styles available in the WordPress themes directory site. There are likewise lots of 3rd party firms that develop professional WordPress themes that you can buy for a small cost. The benefit of purchasing a theme is that they are generally better quality, as well as you get support from the service provider you bought it from.

The theme on your WordPress page determines how your blog site will look. This is very vital as the mood can can immediately influence your site visitors. The good news is, the array of styles readily available to WordPress users is big, and growing daily. Whatever specific niche or blog site you have, there is definitely a style to fit.

WordPress shares a fantastic relationship with the search engines, which is exactly why you find the WordPress blogs getting more attention from Google and other major search engines. All webmasters know and know (as do IMers) that building a site on the WordPress content platform gives you an automatic upper hand in terms of beating your competitors at SEO. If you want to make sure that you get the best results possible from your WordPress blog, you still need to make sure that you optimize it as well you can for optimum performance so that you can reap long term rewards in the form of organic search traffic.

Place your keyword in the title – In relation to optimizing your WordPress blog for the search engines, always keep in mind that the keyword has to be placed in the title. This is one of the most well-located and most efficient ways to be seen by the search engines. But, you should stay away from keyword stuffing as much as you can. Your keyword should go in the title if you think that it will make a huge difference to do it. Your title should not only read well but it should also make sense.

Place your energy on one topic right now, a lot of WordPress blogs range in numerous topics. Not anything is incorrect with this.

But if you want the benefit of SEO then you should try and stick to one single topic. Then, use other sub topic if it is necessary. Why should you be concerned about this? Initially, it will be your visitors who will be reliable for putting new content on your blog by commenting on it. Secondly, the search engines will have an excellent thought of what your blog is about. All of this has a lot to do with how the search engines rank your site.

Incorporate Social Media – When you establish social media buttons, in way you are employing your viewers and getting them to sponsor your content for you. This is a brilliant way to place your blog in the limelight and at the same time assemble natural backlinks as your readers use social media to vouch for your blog. Social media buttons are vital, but they may fill your site with unnecessary stuff, you should be concentrating on content. WordPress SEO is a procedure that will progressively give your blog an upgraded look to the search engines. Because you are using a strong site like WordPress, the result could be eminent. Google has a very high regard for WordPress and the applications attached. Prior to applying WordPress SEO, initially get the essentials in diplomacy; this way you will be more assured of having an established premise to work from and will be more apt to have a well founded grouping later on.

How do you identify the best WordPress developer from a pool of programmers? A dedicated WordPress developer is capable of pushing the boundaries, going beyond the basics and bringing innovations in the project they are assigned. Professional WordPress developers are always busy in researching more about the latest trends and technologies to remain ahead of their peers.

Here are the top 5 qualities of an efficient WordPress developer:

1. Technical Skillset

A good WordPress developer will have apt knowledge of different technologies and be able to create a masterpiece. An ideal WordPress developer should have sound knowledge of PHP, MySQL, codebase on Trac and Xref and should able to set up a local development environment and run the nightly build. They must be well-versed with the technicalities of WordPress such as core, plugins as well as the different themes to be able to create a website, which would help you stay ahead in the competition.

2. Learner’s Mindset

The versions of WordPress are steadily moving forward, and so is the environment. A good developer should keep up with the latest design, technology and security trends to build websites, which are stable and modern. An outdated look or a bugged portal will tarnish your brand image. A stagnant developer will cause stagnation in your business profits and in your image too.

3. Attention and Self-Motivation

WordPress professionals need to continuously push their abilities and have a fair idea of almost all the aspects of this platform. WordPress offers a wide range of options such as plugins, themes, front-end design and e-commerce. Therefore, a developer has to have hands-on, specialized knowledge to figure out what would work best for a project. A self-motivated developer will ensure that his work stands out in the crowd and does not just make up the numbers.

4. Solid Planning Skills

A brilliant developer would be able to sort out a chaos and make something out of nothing. However, lack of planning can become a serious problem – a directionless agenda can result in delays in project delivery and waste of time and energy. An efficient programmer will have a schedule in place and will outline goals – both big and small. They will break down tasks and create as well as adhere to timelines.

5. Testing and Receiving Feedback

Thoroughly testing everything that is dispatched is an important skill of any WordPress developer. They should be sure whatever codes they write work across different browsers and operating systems. Every theme and plugin must be tested across different browsers to avoid last minute hassles. Asking for feedback is a good way to know whether what you’ve created makes sense and reacting positively to feedback shows maturity and dedication towards one’s creation. Your project is in good hands if you manage to hire a developer with these skills.

WordPress is an ever-evolving platform. The core team is always on their toes, trying new things and attempting to improve the existing functionalities.

From being primarily a blogging platform, WordPress has evolved and today it is one of the most popular open source website development platforms. It powers millions of websites on the internet and finding WordPress developers is not a difficult task!

WordPress developers are plenty. This is exactly why finding the right one is very difficult. So, do not rush into the hiring process and select the first one that comes along. You will need to check out a few and make sure that you select the one that exactly suits your requirements.

That said, you need to first finalize upon what your requirements are. This will empower you to be in charge of your website and how it is being developed. Here are a few pointers on how to select WordPress Developers.

Match your requirements and the developer’s WordPress skills

Check the proficiency of the developer in WordPress. This is a very crucial step. There are some developers who excel in some areas but fall short in others. You need to be very clear about what WordPress features you are expecting and then check whether the developer will be able to provide them. So, before you begin, sit down and analyze your requirements and do your homework – understand the basics of WordPress.

Experience in WordPress

Ask the developer about his experience with WordPress. This does not mean that a developer with lesser experience is obviously bad, but it will assure you of the quality of work. Do not check the overall experience. That will include all other technologies that the developer has worked on. Make sure that you ask for specifically WordPress related experience.

WordPress Portfolio

Make sure that you ask the developer for a portfolio. You will get an idea about the type of websites that the developer has experience with. You can then map your requirements and check whether the developer will be able to deliver your kind of work. Ensure that you ask for more than one sample so that you can judge better.

Cost and delivery time

Even if you have decided upon a budget, make sure that you match the quality of work with the amount that you are paying. This is exactly why taking a look at the portfolio helps. You also need to discuss the timelines within which the project needs to be delivered. The launch of your business site should go as per your business plan. So make sure that the developer can deliver as per your timelines.

Overall, select the right WordPress developer after carefully scrutinizing all the requirements and mapping them to the skills of the developers. Interview more than one agency or developers and then take a decision after careful consideration. WordPress developers can give your website a fresh and appealing look exactly as per your requirements, provided you select the right developer after considering all the factors mentioned.

We have heard a lot about WordPress. We all know that it is a blogging platform that comes for free. We can use it according to our need. Now, this great blogging portal brings in a vast range of themes for its users. These themes are nothing but some files that offer your blog or your website an appropriate look and feel. Many of these themes are free. You can just download and apply them on your blog. It is as simple as that.

In this article we are going to talk about different WordPress themes like free themes, e-commerce and responsive themes. Let’s begin with free themes.

Free Themes

These themes are extremely useful for the newbies, though experienced bloggers who do not wish to invest their money for buying premium themes also use these to offer a new and fresh look to their blog. There are many free themes, some of them are Attitude, Expound, Iconic One, Spun, Twenty Twelve etc. Most of these have responsive features and are perfect for corporate, educational and personal websites. You can even customize their features and alter them according to your need.

E-Commerce Themes

If you own a business and want to advertise or sell your products online, there are some very impressive e-commerce themes specifically designed for businessmen who want to sell their products though their virtual shops. You can just set up a blog or a website powered by WordPress and customize it according to your need to sell your products. WordPress has come up with specific series of business themes designed for online shops, blogs or websites related to restaurants, magazines, portfolios etc. Most of these themes have responsive designing features, that is they have equal visibility on all devices. They have a clean look and you can customize them easily. However, you have to pay for most e-commerce themes. Free themes do not have features like the shopping cart that are indispensable for e-commerce websites.

Responsive WordPress Themes

When we speak of responsive WordPress themes, we have to make sure that we are aware of the responsive web designing,the latest trend in the field of designing a website. Moving on in the same direction, a responsive WordPress theme uses the CSS and JAVA script to adjust the layout of the website or a blog to fit into the area inside the browser that we actually see on our PC, Laptop, iPod or Tablet. Having a responsive theme for a blog or website is an extra advantage. This makes the website reach out to more potential clients all over the globe.

So, did you decide which WordPress theme you would like for your blog?

WordPress is one of the fastest growing web development tools around, and provides an excellent solution for people who want to manage dozens or even thousands of websites from a single admin panel.

Perhaps the strongest feature of WordPress is the way the content management system keeps the content of the site separate from the functionality and design. Instead of them all being entwined together, functionality is controlled by plugins and the design is controlled by themes. WordPress themes control every aspect of the design from the colors and fonts to the header, footer and layout.

The growth of WordPress has been impressive. Having started out in 2003 as a simple open source blog publishing tool, WordPress is already used by over 14% of the world's largest websites, as of June 2011.

The last major release of WordPress included WordPress Multisite – a powerful but user-friendly way to manage multiple websites from a single login. While the basics of WordPress Multisite are very simple and a new site can be created in seconds as a subdirectory or sub domain of the parent site, WordPress Multisite has a wealth of other more sophisticated features. For example, WordPress Multisite allows the network manager or "Super Admin" to control what level of access each local site administrator gets to each individual website. The Super Admin also controls which WordPress plugins and themes the local site administrators can access. There is also the option to create sites as independent domains using "domain mapping". This is even more advanced and requires an advanced user or professional WordPress consultant to set up. Subdirectory

To set up a WordPress Multisite network, a user must first have their own self-hosted WordPress installation, updated to the latest version. As of June 2011, the latest version is 3.1.3, but updates are typically released every few months. There are various ways to install WordPress Multisite, but perhaps the best and most reliable instructions are provided by WordPress.org themselves.

Beware that it can be far from straightforward a user to upgrade from standard WordPress to WordPress multisite and the WordPress creators may even keep it that way purposefully. Not for nasty or commercial reasons, but just to save their less experienced users the extra complication. They do this because the technical requirements of WordPress Multisite are considerably greater and less technical users who are not sure what they are doing can easily cause instability in their sites, especially when they have a lot of plugins installed. Certain plugins work well with WordPress Multisite and other plugins are not compatible. The support provided by the developers of WordPress plugins do not always test their plugins with WordPress multisite, let alone in conjunction with all the other plugins. With the infinite possible combinations of plugins that WordPress users may potentially have installed, this would be impossible anyway.

So if you are a technically advanced WordPress user, the best way to install WordPress Multisite is to

1. Backup your current site.
2. Check the requirements of your hosting, especially if you are running the sites as sub-domains or independent domains. These are more complex to set up, but carry many benefits, especially for SEO.
3. Check which of your current plugins have questionable compatibility with WordPress Multisite. Switch off any plugins that you are unsure of.
4. Follow the guidelines WordPress themselves provide and carry out their instructions to the letter.
5. If you are running the multiple websites as independent domains, install domain mapping too, or seek the help of a specialist for this.

However, if you are a relatively recent convert to WordPress or just an intermediate user, then it is strongly recommended that you hire a professional WordPress consultant to do this for you. It can take an expert WordPress developer as little as a couple of hours to install multisite for you, saving you a lot of time and a lot of stress.

For more information, please visit the WordPress Consultant , the London-based specialist in WordPress Multisite and SEO.

How is Cheap WordPress Hosting Possible?

WordPress is a lightweight system that “theoretically” runs on any server that supports PHP and MySQL 5. With this being said, most hosting companies are able to offer extremely low prices to their clients. Knowing this information suddenly makes people’s decisions be based upon “who has the lowest price” and then they choose the cheapest WordPress hosting provider they can.

However, we must not forget about quality. There is a big difference between a website that merely runs and one that runs well. Although most “shared servers ” (shared hosts) meet their user’s demands, there are many other factors that need to be taken into consideration.

When choosing a web host, you need to make sure that your provider will give you all of the necessary resources to make your page run fast and smoothly. You need a company that can enable you to provide the best user experience for your visitors, and that can aid you in positioning well on Google too. So it is important to choose not only the cheapest WordPress host, but the one which offers the highest-quality as well.

Here are some tips to help you pick a high-quality and cheap WordPress web hosting company.

1. Can it handle my needs?

Of course the quality varies from server to server and the complexity of your site is also an issue. A website with various plugins doing several queries to the database consumes more resources and makes your page load slower. But overall, a shared server can run one or more WordPress sites pretty well. A good one, however, can handle a web page that gets 10,000 and 14,000 pageviews a day, without any problems.

2. Speed

A good performing website loads your pages quickly. Having a fast site will ensure that your users stay longer on your page and do not abandon your website due to its slow load time. This a crucial factor if you are engaged in any activity that involves online sales. A virtual store that takes too long to load is bound to lose sales and revenue. People are impatient these days. Leave them waiting and you’ll lose potential customers who will never return to your site again.

P.S. Search engines like Google also consider the speed of your site as one of its ranking factors. Your position on a Google search may be impaired if your site does not have a good loading speed.

So remember, look out for high-performance servers that will assist in the performance of your site (since its speed also depends on the server that hosts your website).

3. Stability

Besides the issue of loading speed, you need to make sure that your site will stick around as long as possible. There is nothing more frustrating for the user than trying to access your site and it’s suddenly offline. Unfortunately, this can happen frequently with a low quality hosting company.

The best hosting providers have their servers monitored 24 hours a day and offer an uptime of more than 99%.

Your website’s ranking on Google may also be adversely affected if it is not frequently available to the public eye. So when choosing a WordPress hosting provider, ensure that your website will always be available to its users.

4. Security

The hosting company should ensure that your website data is protected against any problems related to the server hosting it. If by any chance the server has an outage, the company must have an information system in place so that no data saved on the server is lost in case of accidents. The company must also have a system of routine backups and / or data protection.

5. Customer Service

Chances are, you will need the company’s support at one point or another. Although, you may never have to fix a serious problem, you’ll need help to do at least some basic configurations. When this time comes, it is important that you have an efficient support channel that can be contacted quickly and counted whenever you need them.

Conclusion

I hope you have understood a bit more about WordPress Hosting and have helped you in making the best choice when it comes to taking care of your site.

If you still have any questions on what type of service or hosting company to choose, feel free to contact me at any time. I’ll be glad to help.

WordPress is the most beloved brand in website development, management and CMS (Content Management Systems). Now, if you have a company and you wish to build a website for it (which is nowadays very common!) but you don’t have the resources to manage your website and blogs. You don’t have to worry about this problem. Hire a WordPress developer and hand him over everything you want to put on your website. Outsourcing of this type is nowadays a trend in the commercial realm.

All over the globe, there are many offshore WordPress development centers, and you can avail them at very modest prices. They will not only develop the website for you but also can help you in managing it.

This can be a big quantum leap for a non-technical person who wishes to take the online path of success.

Yet there are many cases when non-tech personalities panic while selecting the service provider. Allow me to rectify this misconception. If you pay required consideration in selecting a Custom WordPress Development Service Provider, you will be able to get the perfect service in accordance with your market niches.

Always opt for these services through references

If there is a slight possibility for you to go with reference, you should take it without any reluctance. Ask your friends, family, and colleagues for references. This can lead you to better quality service.

Always give preference to testimonials

You should always look for a portfolio of the company while hiring the services of WordPress Development. You should ensure that the company has managed project like yours in its tenure. Every company claims so many things but fails to deliver the desired results. So, you must go through their portfolio which can give you a fair idea of the nature of their work and methods.

Make sure that the company provides support after development

It is important that the company you have selected provide after development support for at least a year. It is crucial as no matter how advance the website is, it will initialize with some problem. So, in that case, you don’t have to hover around the market again. Also, make sure of the medium of support they are providing.

Keep yourself aware of the current market price of such services

Do a market research to keep yourself updated about the cost of the services you are seeking. There are many cases where companies offer less price, which I recommend to ignore as they can lead you to very poor quality of work and services. Make a budget and stick to it no matter what.

Request a jargon-free discussion with the company you want to hire

Always interview with the developer who will be handling your project. The output of your project mostly depends on the individual skills of a developer. So, request them to explain their plans and exclude the technical jargons as they might sound foreign to you.

So, keep these things in mind and go for your project. Hire any custom WordPress Development Service you want and make unique websites and blogs. Please comment if you feel I missed something, and share to help others.

If you are building or managing a website for a business with several bricks-and-mortar premises, a dedicated WordPress store locator added to the site is certain to be a useful idea. This is a practical feature to include on a site to make it possible for potential visitors to easily find the closest office or store to their location. Here are a few of the most appealing features of this type of plugin:

Google Maps

Most of these plugins make use of Google Maps to get instant access to a wide range of information such as driving or walking directions to reach the intended destination in the shortest time possible. Plus, the Google Maps plugin makes it possible to view the landscape in several different views and even zoom in to inspect certain areas to make sure the specific directions are practical for the needs.

Responsive design

Any of the latest plugins should include a responsive design that easily works with the different size screens on mobiles and tablets. Many of the mobile supported maps make it possible to swipe, zoom, or pinch to get a better view of the preferred information.

Search criteria

The ability to search for a store, office or other building by GPS coordinates, city, zip code, etc. makes it a lot quicker to find the right destination. Plus, other options can include specifying a travel distance to make sure the visitor is only looking in the local area.

Detailed information

When trying to locate a particular store or office it is helpful to get easy access to other relevant information, such as the full address, phone numbers and opening hours. Plus, a further nice feature to have is a series of external links that leads to other pertinent information like customer feedback on one of the review sites.

Share any location

Adding in a few of the most popular share buttons for the social media sites can help with getting a site more noticed and driving more relevant traffic.

Whether you are in search of a fully customizable and feature rich plugin or something that is simple and easy to operate, there are plenty of WordPress store locator tools to match the specific needs. This type of extension to a website has the ability to make it a lot more user-friendly to site visitors, which helps to increase the natural interest and benefits from the regular repeat visitor.

WordPress is one of the best content management system (CMS) for blogging. And the best thing about WordPress is, it is free and open source, yet powerful. It have committed growing community which develop plugins and themes. And according to Wikipedia, WordPress shares over 12% of 1.000.000 biggest websites on the internet. This make WordPress unbeatable on this kind of CMS.

But like a double edged sword, WordPress so powerful but also resources sucker. More complicated the system, and more resources taking it will be. If it is just a plain WordPress installation, it doesn't take so much resources. But if you add more and more plugins and more complicated themes, then it will take so much resources. So why not uninstall all the plugins then?

Let's come what is the WordPress plugins for. The WordPress plugins goal is to extended the WordPress core function with to add more features to the WordPress. Since WordPress plugins developed by community or personal developer, not all WordPress plugins are good. Most of them are dead projects or abandon projects. And this will make many issues to the WordPress blog itself. And high CPU load is one of them.

Low traffic WordPress blog usually won't make problems with high CPU load or high memory usage. But when it comes to high traffic blog, you have to think about the CPU load and memory usage. Otherwise your blog will slowing down and worst your account will be suspended. Getting suspended is really bad experience, you lost visitors, and that's not good for your site SEO.

Follow the tips below to optimize your high traffic blog:

1. Plugins
WordPress plugins system is one of the most powerful feature from WordPress. Developers or the community can easily make plugins to extend WordPress feature. Beside its easy to use API, it also have complete API documentation. And there are lot of samples and articles on the internet how to develop a WordPress plugin. But this is the double edge feature. Even it is powerful, not all plugins are good. Some of them are dead project or discontinue, and worse it leave security holes to your WordPress blog. So my suggestion is, minimize the use of WordPress plugins. Use only the highly recommended (high rating and most download) and live plugins (not discontinued). Always test plugin on your dummy site before you upload to your live site. One mistake could bring disaster to your site. So choose carefully.

2. Themes
WordPress templates / themes system also one of the best feature of WordPress. You can change themes and customize it easily. And there are lots of themes free or premium themes you can find. I suggest you to use simple, easy to read and beautiful themes for your high traffic blog. Because if your themes is complicated, it will take more resources to your server. For example sliding featured post, this is a good feature for user. But not for server load. Minimize your themes (css, image, and javascript), so it will optimize your server load.

3. Optimize Script
Script Optimization means, delete unnecessary script and modified to optimize script algorithm. Scripts included php, css, sql and javascript. Check your script execution time, and do optimize, optimize and optimize.

4. Use Cache mechanism
This is one of the most important thing you should have for high traffic blog, Caching mechanism. There are lot of WordPress plugin to do caching. There are 4 caching mechanism: database caching, page caching, memory caching and object caching. Database and Page caching that you should have. There are some plugins to do that, but i highly recommend to install db cache reloaded and hyper cache. These 2 plugins would be the best for caching mechanism.

5. Host images to another server or use cdn
Host your images on another server or use cdn could be better. Host images on another server or cdn will reduce your server cpu load. Imagine if you have 1k images stored on your server. And you have to serve 10k visitors a day. This will take your cpu resources, and the result your site will response slower. Beside images, you can host css and javascript files too on another server or cdn.

6. Analyze your traffic
Use and analyze your analytic or traffic monitoring application. I recommend Google analytics and Awstats. Google anayltics to analyze your traffic sources, daily traffic, and many things. And from this data you can make decision where you should host your site, for example most your traffic is come from US, then host your site inside US. And analyze your traffic with Awstats (available on Cpanel), to find less traffic hours. And you should do your backup or update on this hours.

7. Optimize database and backup regularly
Optimize database, is also important, if you have lots of data on your MySql database, it will make overhead data. So you need to regularly optimize your database to keep your MySql database performance. And You should backup your database regularly, for disaster prevention.

8. Upgrade to VPS
At last, when you get 5K traffic per day, you don't have another option but go for VPS (Virtual Private Server). Buy the the smallest or medium VPS just for a start. And later as your site growing, add more resources to your VPS.

That's it for now. Final words, good luck to your blogs and happy blogging.