Top Four Benefits of Hiring Professional Fort Lauderdale Web Design Services

Nobody can deny the irrevocable and inevitable growth of mobile technology around the world. Due to this reason, it is has become necessary for every online business to improve its visibility for every type of devices, and for a wide range of screen sizes. To ensure that you have approach to all sorts of viewers from different parts of the world, it is imperative that you plan your online presence properly. For you to achieve this, you need to hire professional Fort Lauderdale web design services. An established web design company is equipped with all the latest tools and technologies to deliver high quality website design and to make your site more accessible on every device. Professional web developers are committed to providing you the most consistent and effective web designing solutions that will give your users a great experience. Here are some benefits of hiring professional web development services.

Increased Search Engine Visibility

A well-designed website can help you to improve your search engine rankings. For starters, an experienced web design company can make sure that the code markup is clean and easy to read. Another factor that increases your search engine visibility comes from all the links and added exposure your website design gets across the web.

Reduce Your Maintenance Time Greatly

With a professional website design, the time you spend cleaning things up and ensuring everything is up to date is reduced greatly. This gives you more time to focus on other important things, such as increasing traffic, sales and visibility. In most cases, your design will not have to be touched for a year or two until you are ready for an updated look.

Consistent Brand Identity

A professional website designer thinks about the big picture. They can help you come up with a visual language that is consistent across different contextual settings. Your site, business cards, logo and even your social media profiles have to form a coherent whole. An experienced website designer is aware of the emerging trends in web designing will help you create a consistent brand identity.

Distinction from Your Competitors

A professional WordPress web design company can design your website in a unique way that sets you apart from your competitors. They can help you choose the right fonts, spacing of texts, and contract in order to make a difference in the overall quality of your site. Professional web design will also utilize the advanced web designing techniques to make your site informational and easy to navigate.

There are other major benefits you can derive by hiring professional web design Fort lauderdale services. To get the best results, you should only hire a qualified website designing company. Consider factors such as experience, estimated completion time, cost and past references.

Bricks & Mortar launches extension on Magento Connect

We have just received word that we have placed our first extension on the Magento Connect store. Our very useful and very diverse extension, Add Custom Steps To Magento Checkout, can now be found on the Magento Connect store.

This extension is ideal for gathering data, upselling services, customizing products and much more. This extension works right within the native Magento admin, and operates just like the custom options do on a product, so if you can use Magento, you can use this product.

We have tested it on multiple sites, and it’s currently in production on many more, but we always suggest you back your database up before installation. We can’t guarantee that this extension will not conflict with another extension, all we can do is ask you to watch it in action.

Also, with a little bit of CSS and jQuery, the possibilities are endless. Customize your entire checkout process to follow a custom flow, fully animated with your favorite scripting (just try not to go overboard, ok).

Bricks & Mortar clients and friends can save 15% on this product with coupon code: BRICKS15.

Update Cart Not Working On Magento 1.9?

We recently upgraded a Magento website for a client from version 1.4 to the most recent version (at the time), version 1.9.0.1. Once we were able to resolve the major issues from the upgrade, there were still quite a few minor issues that took some time to recognize. One of these issues was that the “Update Cart” button was not affecting the cart quantity.

The first place to look was the file that contained the update cart button, which is within the folder app/design/frontend/rwd/THEME NAME/template/checkout/cart.php. Once the file is opened, look somewhere around line 100 for the button, which should look like this:

[php] <button type="submit" name="update_cart_action" value="update_qty" title="<?php echo $this->__(‘Update Shopping Cart’); ?>" class="button btn-update"><span><span><?php echo $this->__(‘Update Shopping Cart’); ?></span></span></button>
[/php]

If your button is already set up properly, it’s likely your checkout form is missing or has an incorrect form key, which is required for the form to validate. First, search your template for the string ‘formkey’ to either locate it on your template, or confirm it is missing all together. If it is there, it’s likely the entire snippet looks something like this:

[php] <?php echo $this->getBlockHtml(‘formkey’); ?>
[/php]

If so, you can either comment this out, edit it, or remove it all together so that it can be replaced by:

[php] <input type="hidden" name="form_key" value="<?php echo Mage::getSingleton(‘core/session’)->getFormKey(); ?>"/>
[/php]

If you can’t find the string ‘formkey’ anywhere in your document, you will just need to add in the above snippet into the form on cart.phtml. You can find the closing fieldset for the form around line 117 and paste it in just before it.

Once your file is updated to include the correct key, recheck your “Update Cart” button and everything should be working as needed.

Squarespace Vs WordPress – What’s Best For Your Company?

When it comes to building a website for your company, there are quite a few things to take into consideration, one of the more important is the content management system, or CMS you will use to manage the website. While there are countless content management systems available, two of the more popular are WordPress and Squarespace. Let’s breakdown Squarespace vs WordPress so you can understand what is best for you.

Who Is Building Your Website?

So you’re building a website and you know you’re going with either Squarespace or WordPress. The first thing you should figure out is who will be building your website? If you plan to do it all yourself and you don’t have much experience designing websites, you may want to take the Squarespace route. Squarespace makes it very easy for beginners to choose templates, populate content and images, configure website details and go live without much difficulty. Squarespace offers a number of attractive themes or templates that are generally customizable, allowing even the most inexperienced designer to create something decent looking.

If you plan to hire a professional web design company to build your website, this changes things a bit. Some website design companies offer clients a Squarespace and a WordPress option. This way, clients with varying budgets have options. In most cases, the biggest difference will be that while both the Squarespace and WordPress websites can be designed to fit the company or brand, there will be limitations when it comes to both frontend and backend capabilities when it comes to Squarespace vs WordPress. All in all, a website for WordPress will typically be a bit more customized to the business. Either way, make sure to look at the web design companies portfolio to make sure they have a verifiable history of WordPress web design or Squarespace website design.

Website Frontend Functionality

One of the biggest things you should know when deciding on WordPress or Squarespace is what is capable from a frontend design standpoint. A websites frontend functionality, or user experience, will generally cover all of the things that a user can interact with on a website. While Squarespace offers quite a few out of the box elements that have various effects and animations that can be applied to them, there is a very definite limit as to what can be achieved. This means that for a company that simply needs to have a basic, clean, informational website, Squarespace may be the right solution.

 

Squarespace vs WordPress – Which Is More Usable?

With WordPress, website developers and website design companies are able to utilize any sort of frontend frameworks, libraries or other code that they would like. Javascript is a very popular language right now that is used to deliver fast, impressive user experiences across all browsers and devices. When looking at Squarespace and WordPress from a web designers point of view, WordPress gives much more flexibility as to what can be achieved and the customizations that can be brought to the user experience.

Website Backend Functionality

When it comes to creating custom backend functionality, WordPress is the winner hands down. To understand why it’s important to understand the primary differences between WordPress vs Squarespace WordPress is an open source, self-hosted content management system, which means that you have access to both the site files and the database itself. This allows developers to develop finely tuned plugins and services for websites on demand.

WordPress also is truly built for scalability. It offers a variety of utilities to developers such as post_meta data, user_meta data, and much more. This allows developers to easily tie together various pieces of data, associate user accounts with products and information and so much more. Whether the need is for basic informational content routing, dynamic contact form routing, or anything else, developing a clean, custom solution is never impossible. It’s hard to compare Squarespace and WordPress when looking at it in these terms.

WordPress also makes developing plugins very easy, allowing developers to easily create custom functionalities for their websites as needed. There is also a huge community of WordPress plugin developers that create plugins of all sorts for free. Plugin functionality covers the literal range of needs, from basic forms to full-on CRM systems. If you were to ask any modern web developer if they preferred Squarespace and WordPress, I would assume the answer is WordPress nine times out of ten.

Plugins / Development Community

There is an ever-growing number of WordPress plugins readily available free of charge download from the WordPress.org Plugin Directory Site. There are also tons of exceptional or paid plugins for WordPress. When it comes to the development community backing WordPress or Squarespace, there really is no question. The WordPress plugin and development community is one of the largest and most active open-source communities in the world. Currently, there are more than 50 thousand plugins available free of charge for users to install on their websites to add enhanced features, enhance SEO, include additional functionality, add improved security and a number of other reasons. This makes the question of WordPress or Squarespace a lot easier if making your decisions based on framework scalability.

In addition to free plugins, there are also thousands of paid plugins. Why would you want to spend money on a plugin? Well, there are numerous reasons. While there are countless plugins offered totally free from the plugin directory site, paid plugins normally provide full-time assistance personnel and designers that deal with preserving the security and compatibility of plugins with the most recent variation of WordPress along with other styles and plugins.

Typically, plugins for WordPress won’t throw conflicts with the core of WordPress or with other plugins, however, in some cases, a plugin’s code will cause problems. With free plugins, it’s atypical that a plugin developer would support an issue. However, with a paid plugin, it’s you are also paying for the assistance from a professional developer if anything fails.

WordPress & Squarespace 3rd Party Tools

Squarespace also has an app marketplace available to its users. Many apps are free, however, others will have monthly fees. Also, Squarespace does not necessarily provide support for any of the third-party plugins. These plugins are also typically more limited in scope as far as custom functionality and business processes go when it comes to free options.

For example, where they may be a specific feature available from a Squarespace plugin, there may be 3-4 free plugin options with the same and/or more features. This means that the more complex your need, the more likely it will be easy to achieve using WordPress or WordPress themes. When it comes to backend customization, WordPress is the winner when comparing WP & Squarespace.

Drag & Drop Editor

One of the things Squarespace is most known for is it’s “drag and drop” editor. The Squarespace editor is easy to use and makes it simple to create a beautiful website. No matter the experience level of the user, if you’re generally comfortable on a computer, you should be able to set up a Squarespace website.

The Squarespace website builder provides the user with a number of elements that can be dragged, dropped, configured, and filled with content, images, and videos. This allows users to set up their content using attractive design elements, without compromising traditional design practices and maintaining a professional look. So this time in the question of Squarespace verses WordPress, Squarespace has the upper hand.

Or at least it did… Up until recently, WordPress didn’t offer a native draggable editor. Because of this, a number of plugins were created to meet this need such as Elementor and Divi. However, since these were plugins, this added the potential for plugin conflicts, security concerns and decreased website speed performance.

In late 2018, WordPress released their first native manual element-based website builder – Gutenberg. Gutenberg provides a huge number of out of the box elements that can be dragged and dropped into the WordPress content area. Designers can then pull these blocks into their themes and create global styles for them. This gives website owners and novice users the ability to create easy to manage designs like with Squarespace. This also gave many novice website builders something more to think about when choosing between WordPress or Squarespace.

Because it’s WordPress, this means that WordPress web developers can also create custom elements, custom blocks and more for the Gutenberg editor. This is a feature that is not really available to Squarespace designers, at least not in as robust a manner as with WordPress. All of a sudden, WordPress is holding it’s own in the drag and drop editor competition.

So when it comes to the manual drag/drop editing question of Squarespace vs WordPress, the answer is hard. I would still say that Squarespace has an easier to use manual dragging editor, however, WordPress does offer more flexibility. That also doesn’t mean that as Gutenberg won’t surpass Squarespace as it matures.

E-commerce Functionality

Both Squarespace and WordPress offer e-commerce online store capabilities and online shopping options. Both platforms offer integrations with the top payment processors like authorize.net and Stripe. Both platforms allow you to get shipping rates and assess shipping costs based on location. Both platforms allow you to manage and maintain robust product catalogs. However, just as we mentioned above, WordPress does offer quite a bit more when it comes to delivering custom e-commerce capabilities.

WordPress offers a variety of e-commerce options, however the most popular is WooCommerce. WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It is best for small to large-sized online merchants that are already utilizing WordPress. Introduced on September 27, 2011, the plugin rapidly ended up being well-known for how easy it is to set up and personalize.

WooCommerce was developed by popular WordPress vendor, WooThemes. WooThemes contracted Mike Jolley and James Koster, designers at Jigowatt, to deal with a fork of Jigoshop that ended up being WooCommerce. By August 2014, WooCommerce powered 381,187 websites, which accounted for roughly 17.77% of e-commerce websites online.

WooCommerce is utilized by a variety of high-traffic websites from a variety of niches. For the 3rd week of September 2015, data showed that WooCommerce was running on 30% of e-commerce websites.

E-commerce is quickly growing around the world and WooCommerce has more than 39 million downloads as a plugin and is presently active on more than 3 million sites and is the most popular eCommerce platform in 2018. WooCommerce has roughly 4% of the leading million HTML pages.

Due to the WooCommerce’s popularity, it also has a very active plugin development community. This means that it’s very easy to find a free plugin that will fulfill whatever your e-commerce needs are.

So when it comes to e-commerce web design functionality, the most important question when it comes to Squarespace vs WordPress is what is your need. Do you simply need to list a basic product, collect payments, and process an order? Or do you have bigger aspirations for how you’d like to display your products and engage your customers? Whether you go with WordPress or you go with Squarespace, you will be able to sell your products, however, the platform will determine just how flexible you can be, and just how much it will cost you to enter the market.

Website Cost

One of the biggest questions you should have as a new website owner is what will the website cost you. In general, you will have upfront costs for WordPress vs. Squarespace design and development, ongoing costs for hosting and email, as well as maintenance and security costs. You will incur all of these costs in one way or another on both platforms, however, they will be different.

Starting with up-front costs, it will generally cost more to have a custom WordPress website built than a custom Squarespace website. It will cost you a lot less time and effort to set up a basic Squarespace website yourself than it would to set up a basic theme on WordPress yourself. The up-front WordPress costs really only have to be as much as you feel comfortable taking on though as it should not be difficult to find a designer or developer to work within your budget.

Once your website is built, there is no monthly or yearly subscription to use WordPress, however, there is with Squarespace. Website’s using WordPress need to be hosted on a server. Monthly WordPress hosting can cost anywhere from $5 per month to $500+ per month. However, even the smallest of shared servers are typically able to run several WordPress websites, so the costs greatly reduce for every WordPress instance you host. This is not the case with Squarespace websites.

In addition to the base cost for the Squarespace site subscription, there are also a number of add-on costs for things like e-commerce, various integrations, and features and much more. As mentioned previously, when it comes to WordPress, there is almost always a free plugin that will do what you need. And if you’re unable to find the right free plugin, paid plugins usually have a one-time cost, not a monthly fee for use.

Squarespace vs WordPress – What Are Ongoing Costs?

WordPress hosting plans will also usually come with at least a couple, if not unlimited email inboxes. This is a cost you may have to take on anyways in addition to your Squarespace costs.

Ongoing website maintenance, website updates and upgrades, and website management is not something that will come with any WordPress website, however, the company that builds the site will typically offer these services. With Squarespace, your subscription fees do go a long way to cover website support, theme design assistance and more, however, it’s rarely the same one-on-one, dedicated support that you would get directly from a web design agency. However, if this is not something your company truly needs, then there is no real need to take on additional, unnecessary costs.

Overall, when it comes to website costs it’s always going to be one of those things where you get what you pay for. Squarespace vs WordPress website costs at the very bottom line will be generally similar, however as your need for more customization and more websites grow, WordPress quickly becomes the more economical option.

Website Security

One concern that every website owner should have is website security. Every website is generally susceptible to security threats. Therefore, so are any networks that may be connected to web servers or accessing websites. A websites web server and the site or sites hosted on it can definitely present a number of different security risks. Because of this risk, it’s important to take considerations towards locking down your website, it’s data, and what you are exposing your website users to. Let’s take a look at WordPress and Squarespace when it comes to website security.

Squarespace is a hosted platform, meaning that for the most part, security is not your concern. Squarespace manages the server and it’s security, allowing you to simply worry about continuing to deliver content and services to your website users. However, this also means that if Squarespace’s codebase were ever to be compromised, that every Squarespace website would be potentially vulnerable. In addition, in the event of human error, like a Squarespace employee clicking a malicious link, you then run the risk of compromising your or your clients use information. The likelihood of these things happening is, of course, minimal, and a company the size of Squarespace goes far and above to prevent these types of things from happening.

Squarespace vs WordPress – Which Is More Vulnerable

WordPress, on the other hand, is a more vulnerable system at its core. To start, it’s opensource, meaning that anyone can dig through its code to figure out how it works. This is intended to drive the platform and it features forward, however, there are of course those who will exploit this. In addition, your typical shared web hosting server is not going to have the same type of security protocols in place that a company like Squarespace might.

WordPress does have a number of highly effective, and very robust security plugins. However, there are also thousands of plugins floating around the internet that have been infected with malicious code, just waiting to be run on unsuspecting WordPress websites.

All in all, if website security is a concern, there are a number of easy ways to lock down and harden a WordPress instance to the point where it is nearly impossible for the average hacker to break in. Depending on the need and the sensitivity of the data being stored, there are also measures that can be taken to store data on external servers with even stronger security protocols. However, it goes without saying that there will without a doubt be thousands of WordPress websites that will be hacked and compromised in the next year, while it’s unlikely that Squarespace will be compromised at a global level. So, when comparing WordPress and Squarespace when it comes to security, the verdict is really entirely based on each website owners circumstances.

Squarespace vs WordPress, What’s The Verdict?

When all is said and done, we will always prefer WordPress. It’s flexible, robust, and makes it easy to create really usable website features for clients. Designing custom themes and interactive features is also as flexible as can be, so from a web designer’s standpoint, the choice is simple.

However, we understand our clients’ needs as well as their budgets. That being said, Squarespace websites can be the best decision for an MVP product, especially when launching a new brand and looking to do market research. Squarespace websites are also perfect for the small local business that is looking to get on the internet and make a name for themselves.

Work With Proper Noun

If you’re interested in learning more about WordPress websites or talking to us about having us design a custom WordPress theme or WordPress plugin, don’t hesitate to reach out and schedule a strategy session.

The 10 Plugins You Should Have On Your WordPress Website.

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems not only for blogs, but also for informational websites and e-commerce web stores as well. One feature that makes WordPress so popular is the large library of free plugins available for install on any website. Because it is an open source CMS, this means that any developer can access the source code and create plugins that will either introduce new functionality to the website, or extend functionality that may already exist on the platform. There are literally tens of thousands of free plugins available, often times with multiple plugin options available that deliver the same functionality. Not every website will be in need or be able to utilize all of the same plugins, but below is a list of 10 that any WordPress website could use to improve traffic, performance, usability or user experience.

Yoast SEO
The first plugin that every WordPress website should utilize is the Yoast SEO plugin. This plugin helps easily manage almost every aspect of your on page search engine optimization including the page titles, meta descriptions, sitemaps, internal links, permalink structure, robots.txt files and much more. The plugin also features a bulk title and description editor so that you don’t have to go page by page to update your keyword rich content, you can do it all at once from one central dashboard. The plugin also allows for easy sync with your social profiles, Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools, Alexa Tracking, Pinterest and much more. This plugin is perfect for a web master just getting started with SEO as well as seasoned SEO professionals as it focuses on some of the most important aspects of any websites on page optimization efforts. There are also many paid extensions available for the Yoast SEO plugin that deliver even more SEO features, but the free version is more than enough for anyone to start optimizing their page properly. Proper on page optimization is crucial when it comes to the success of a website, and this plugin takes away a lot of the guess work.

Advanced Custom Fields
One of the things developers love about WordPress is how easy it is to create Custom Post Types and just how versatile and easy to work with these Custom Post Types can be. Advanced Custom Fields is a plugin that will make any WordPress developers life considerably easier as it allows you to add in custom input fields of any type to any post type, page type or custom post type of your choosing. For example, lets say we have created a new Custom Post Type called “Properties” for a real estate website. In our “Properties” page template, we need to make sure to include a property map, a youtube video, and links to three similar properties along with the properties main description and main image. With Advanced Custom Fields it’s as simple as creating the new field type, creating the three new input types and associating them with the specific post type “Properties”. Now in your page template all you will need to do is echo the field in your loop to display the contents.

For example, if the “Youtube Video” field is named “youtube_video” and is supposed to accept a Youtube embed link, the code inserted in your page template would look something like this:

echo get_field('youtube_video'); 

This allows you to create as many custom fields as you’d like for any custom post type with inputs including text fields, text areas, WYSIWYG editors, select dropdowns, radio buttons and much more. There are also multiple paid extensions available that further improve the functionality, allowing you to easily add in repeater fields, photo galleries and much more. Advanced Custom Fields is a must have extension for any WordPress developers tool kit.

W3 Total Cache
One problem a lot of WordPress website owners will see is slow loading pages and slow load times to first byte. This can be due to many reasons, but is usually due to the number of scripts being loaded on the page, the number of stylesheets being loaded on the page, the number of images being loaded on the page, the number of plugins being used on page load, and the number of database requests the page makes. There multiple actions you can take to combat these problems including compressing your scripts and stylesheets, caching your scripts, caching images, caching stylesheets, enabling gzip, and many other typically server side modifications to help your website deliver it’s assets faster.

The W3 Total Cache plugin allows you to easily compress and cache a lot of your websites slower loading scripts and stylesheets, will help cache and optimize your images for improved page load times, and just optimize your website all around for the best server performance within it’s capabilities. This plugin won’t always be a better solution than actually modifying the htaccess file, or compressing and caching certain scripts, but this is a great tool for novice site owners to quickly improve page speed which is such a crucial factor in search rankings.

FS Contact Form
Every website has a contact page and every contact page should have a contact form to allow for users to easily email the site owner with questions, requests or concerns. Our go to Contact Form solution is Fast Secure Contact Forms each and every time. FS Contact Forms allows you to create multiple forms with varying input fields so that you may gather different information from your users depending on what page they’re on. FS Contact Forms is easy to style to match your websites look and feel with all of the styling options available right inside a tab of the plugin. Best of all, the plugin generates a custom short code that can be included in any page, post or widget on your website as well as within a template. The plugin takes about 5 minutes to set up and include and will deliver a much improved user experience for anyone visiting your website looking to make contact.

Contact Form DB
Once you install the Fast Secure Contact Form it’s important that you also install the Contact Form DB plugin. This plugin, once installed, will automatically sync with FS Contact Forms, as well as many other contact form plugins, so that all contact form submissions will also be easily stored in the database. This plugin provides a safety net for those unexpected and unwanted times when we lose all of our emails, our websites go down, our computers get viruses, and any situation in which you could lose valuable email leads stored in your inbox. The plugin creates an easy to access dashboard where you can see a running list of all contact forms submitted, who submitted them, the time and date, the message and much more so that you never have to worry about missing out on an important lead.

Options Framework
The Theme Options plugin is another great plugin that every web developer should have in their tool kit. This WordPress plugin easily allows for a developer to create an admin section under the “Appearance” menu option titled “Theme Options” that can store a lot of general and global page information that may not be suitable for a custom post type. For instance, we may want to include an upload field so that the website owner can easily upload a logo, a “copyright” field so that copyright information can be managed, and a “Call To Action” field so that we can place and edit one call to action statement globally throughout the website.

Once installed, you’ll need to modify the ‘options.php’ file to include the different input areas to your needs and then upload back into your server via FTP. This will require some working knowledge of PHP but as you’re just modifying the file, not rewriting all of the code, it’s pretty straightforward and easy to manipulate for your needs. Once the file is placed back on the server, you’ll see all of your new theme options within the “Theme Options” tab.

Now that you can insert content into your theme options, you’ll need to be able to show this content on your website. Simply navigate to the template files you’d like to include the options in and add in the following where your option goes:

of_get_option($id,$default);

Where ID = your option ID.

Post Types Order
Often times when creating multiple posts throughout post types and custom post types, you’ll need to deliver those posts in a loop that requires a specific order. For instance, if you are building a site for a law firm and you are creating a custom post type for “Lawyers”, you may need to change the order in which the posts are shown so that certain lawyers are shown first in the list, even if their posts were created last or vice versa. Post Types Order is a plugin that makes it easy for any admin user to quickly change the order of any posts within any post type so that the content will display exactly as needed on the front-end. The plugin adds in an additional “Reorder” option to each post types admin menu, that when clicked, makes it easy to drag and drop the posts into new positions. This plugin removes the need for manually modifying publish times within posts or introducing jquery or template hacks.

Wordfence Security
Website security should be a concern for any website owner, but especially for WordPress website owners as it’s popularity alone makes it an easy to identify target. The Wordfence Security plugin has both a free and paid version, but the free version will provide more than enough security for most site owners. Some of the great features included are automatic emails sent whenever someone logs in to the system as well as when someone tries to log in unsuccessfully too many times. It will allow you to block specific IPs, specific countries, and scan your site for potential issues and needed upgrades. It also gives you opportunities to improve site performance by offering advanced caching methods. This plugin is lightweight, easy to use and a great line of security between hackers and your website content.

Social Share Boost
Social Share Boost, or SS Boost, is a simple plugin that, once installed, allows you to sync with multiple social platforms including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Once synced, it will add an additional dialog box to all of your posts that will allow you to publish all of your new posts directly to your social profiles at the same time they are published on your blog. This will not only save you an immense amount of time, but will ensure all of your blog posts, articles and pages get as much social share and exposure as possible.

Google Sitemap
The final plugin on this list is one with one simple function, but one that should be included on every WordPress website, Google Sitemap. The Google Sitemap plugin allows you to quickly and easily create a sitemap of your website including only the pages, posts and categories that you want to, excluding the others. It also updates the sitemap regularly with any new pages or posts so that whenever your sitemap is crawled by the Google crawlers, it’s going to be given the most recent version. This is extremely important when it comes to Google’s understanding of your page content as well as how many pages Google will index from your website. It’s no secret that the more high quality pages your website has indexed Google, the better your rankings will become. This plugin makes sure that any and all new pages will be indexed as quickly as possible by Google.

As I had mentioned, these are only 10 plugins of the tens of thousands of plugins available in the WordPress plugin library. These 10 plugins will help improve both usability for you, the admin, and your users ultimately resulting in a better user experience and more leads through your website.

Group Custom Post Types in a Top Level WordPress Menu

There are many times when I’m working on a custom WordPress website that I find myself having to create several custom post types to improve the clients user experience. In most cases I find that some of these post types would make sense being grouped together under a single menu item. Not only does this help keep the WordPress admin menu from being cluttered with too many items, but it also helps to logically group related content together.

When I first looked up how to create this relationship between post types, I had trouble finding what I was looking for. It turns out that $args argument for the register_post_type function has an option called show_in_menu. This allows us to specify a parent menu for the custom post type to be located under. I found that I usually don’t need a real relationship between the post types, as long as they are grouped together in a way that makes sense to the end user.

Creating a new menu item in the WordPress admin panel

The first thing we need to do is create a new menu item that we will use to group our custom post types under.

For example, if we had post types related to cars we might have a top level menu called cars, and then have custom post types called ‘muscle cars’, ‘exotic imports’, or ‘hybrid cars’ grouped together under this menu item.

We need to use the add_menu_page function to create our top level menu:

add_menu_page takes several parameters: add_menu_page( $page_title, $menu_title, $capability, $menu_slug, $function, $icon_url, $position ); the $menu_title parameter is what the name of our top level menu item will be and $menu_slug is the name that we will provide to our custom post types.

So for our cars example we could do this:

add_action( 'admin_menu', 'register_my_page' ); 
function register_my_page() { 
add_menu_page( 'Cars, 'Cars', 'edit_others_posts', 'cars_menu, function() { echo ‘cars page’ }, dashicons-arrow-right, 6 );
}

How to add a custom post type to our new menu

Now when we create the $args for our custom post types we just need to make sure we have:

‘show_ui’ => true,
‘show_in_menu’ => ‘cars_menu’,

We provide our menu slug name to the show_in_menu parameter and our custom post type will show in the cars menu item in our WordPress admin page.

Hopefully this WordPress pro tip will help you improve your custom templates as much as it has ours.

Responsive Web Design Why is it Important?

Have you ever wondered how one website has the same display on your tablet, phone, and computer? It is able to fluidly resize because it is a responsive web design. A site designed with responsive web design can adapt its layout to the screen size that it is being projected on through proper development. This development is mainly done through CSS media queries. CSS is the coding that dictates the way a webpage is presented. Another way responsive web design is done is through fluid layouts, which uses sizing in percentages rather than pixels or points.

Why is a Responsive Web Design Important for your Website:
Having a responsive website has become one of the most important components in website development. This is because the use of tablets and mobile web has increased significantly in the last two years. When building a website user experience is key. The ability for a site to adapt to all screen sizes allows for optimal user experience. For example when viewing a site on your phone and then switching to your desktop you never have to worry about seeing a lesser version, or having to search for the desktop URL of this site. That is because with responsive web design regardless of where you are viewing the URL remains the same. It is also important to have a responsive web design for SEO purposes. When you don’t need multiple sites for desktop and mobile you don’t need multiple SEO campaigns.

Site conversions increase greatly when you have responsive web design. When your user doesn’t have to work as hard for what they are doing they are more likely to come back. Having a responsive web design can keep you ahead of your competition because many people don’t believe that it is necessary to have a mobile friendly site. However, what they don’t realize is a lot of traffic starts as mobile and is then converted to web.

Advantages of a Responsive Web Design:
Your sites content and design, as a whole is the same from desktop version to tablet, and mobile. This means there is no need for the user to relearn anything when using the site. The URL for the mobile site and desktop site is the same allowing analytics to be easily tracked, and users to easily access the site from any device. Having the same URL can also be good for SEO because it will still be ranked despite where the traffic is coming from. On a development side there is only one site to maintain as opposed to having a mobile and desktop version. This is also true for a content management perspective.

Examples of Responsive Web Design:
Some big name examples of responsive web designs are sites such as; www.DSLRPros.com. The best way to figure out if a site is responsive or not is to adjust the size of your browser. If the screen doesn’t change at all chances are it is not responsive. However, with DSLRPros the smaller you go the more it changes in order to keep everything on the same screen. Another example is www.mashable.com if you visit this site from your phone rather than having a mobile link it shrinks from its three columns to one column. Allowing mobile and desktop viewers to get the same experience from the same URL.

5 Things to Look for When Choosing a Web Development & Marketing Company

There are a lot of reasons people choose outside help when it comes to their web development and marketing. The main reason is they don’t have the background, knowledge, skill, or most important time to do these things. Much like their clients turn to them they turn to professionals. Choosing a reliable fit is no easy task, and finding the company that represents your business properly can be hard. Here are 5 things to look for when choosing the right web development and marketing company for your next project.

Clearly Identify Your Objectives:
By knowing what you want your final outcome to be you can narrow your choices. Ask yourself what are your goals for your web development and marketing? What do you want from your web development and marketing company? Make your goals realistic don’t just say you want to be the first on the search engine. A good web development and marketing company will sit down with you, and discuss potential long-term and short-term goals you should expect. Ask them what they can do for you along with what you want you want them to do for you. For example what kind of site you want, and what kind of marketing you want to achieve.

Make Sure They Actually Built Their Own Website:
Some companies use short cuts when building websites like buying already made themes and customizing them to fit your needs. This isn’t web development this is cheating you. When paying for web development you want something unique, and specifically customized to you and your business. Anyone can learn to change the colors, fonts, and photos on a premade theme. Plus now you have a website that is probably already out there who knows how many times with multiple business names on it. Ask to see a portfolio of past and present work. This way you can get an idea of what you can expect for you site. Ask if the company uses premade or original themes.

Do They Provide Communication and Support:
When working with your web development and marketing company it’s important both of you are happy with the work. Are they listening to you and your ideas? Are they making the changes you want? It is also important that the company you choose is available if you need them. Do they respond well to your calls, or emails? Can you trust them with your site? How long after your site is done does the support last? These are all important questions to ask and research when choosing the company for you. Asking someone who has used this company before it is a smart way to get the answers you need.

Can You Manage Your Own Content:
A lot of the time websites are built on a CMS (content management systems). This enables you to easily access content on your site, and update it whenever you need to. The right web development and marketing company will give you the proper training and support to do this after creating your website. This also allows you to manage your site and keep it up to date without any additional costs.

Is On Page SEO (search engine optimization) Included:
Making sure the company you choose knows how to properly perform SEO is important. Is it built into your website? How do they decide on your keywords? Are they as good as they say they are? SEO is important to your marketing and your website overall and it is important you ask as many questions as you can. If you don’t get answers or you feel you can’t trust this person with your SEO you should consider a different company. Some companies offer copy writers and content writers to help with SEO and websites overall. These are the companies to take a closer look at.