5 Essential WordPress Tips for Beginners

5 Essential WordPress Tips for Beginners

So you’ve chosen WordPress to start your new website.  What do you do now?  Every WordPress website starts out the same with a basic WordPress installation.  From there the possibilities are endless.  In fact, it can be overwhelming how many choices you have when it comes to the amount of themes and plugins that are available, some are free and some are not.  For those of you that are building a WordPress website for the first time, I’ve put together a list of 5 essential tips to help you out. Tip #1 – Secure your website WordPress is a popular CMS.  That popularity can come at a price. Since WordPress accounts for almost 20% of all websites now it is a popular target for hackers and malware. The most basic way to secure your website is to pick a username other than admin.  By default, WordPress sets up the initial user as admin. Hackers know this and use this to their advantage. Always choose your own username. Pick a really secure password.  Your password should always have a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers and at least one symbol.  If you have a hard time keeping track of your passwords, you should check out LastPass one of our favorite apps. Stop bots from trying to log into your site with Limit Login Attempts. The plugin simply does what it says.  After a set amount of failed login attempts the person/computer gets locked out of trying to login for a certain amount of time.  Here are a couple of failed attempts to login to a website.  Notice they...
New website launched for Parties By Confetti

New website launched for Parties By Confetti

Let’s get this party started! We just launched a new website for Parties By Confetti, a party planning service in Bend, Oregon.  For their website we worked together to come up with a fun, yet classy, design using bright colors and accents.  Their new blog lets them share all the party fun with everyone too.  After they clean up of course. They have a bunch of great party themes to choose from like Princess For A Day (pretty self explanatory) and Up, Up, and Away (an air travel party theme).  There are plenty more themes in the works and , since we used WordPress as the CMS for the website, they can easily add more whenever they want. If you’re in need of someone to help make your next party amazing you should definitely check out Melissa and Carrie at Confetti.  They have over ten years of combined experience in the event industry and two very creative imaginations. Check them out at www.partiesbyconfetti.com    ...
Which Web Browser Do You Use?

Which Web Browser Do You Use?

There are many different web browser options out there today that can be used on Windows and Mac computers.  Like anything in life they each have their pros and cons.  All of them will let you browse the internet, watch some videos on Youtube and keep up with your friends on Facebook.  How they do all of these things can vary from browser to browser however. So which browser do you use? Many people use the browser their computer came with. If you use a Windows computer, odds are you use Internet Explorer (IE).  It’s hard not to.  It comes pre-loaded as part of Windows and is set as the default browser. If you use a Mac, you most likely use Safari. Just like IE it comes pre-loaded as the default browser on all Apple computers. In case you didn’t know…Those aren’t your only options. According to the global stats at statcounter.com, Google Chrome was the most popular browser for the month of March in 2014 with 24.22% overall.  Microsoft’s Internet Explorer takes the next top two spots with IE11 and IE8.   Firefox comes in at the 4th and 5th position, while Apple’s Safari comes in at the 9th position. My browser of choice is Google Chrome.  Sleek, fast, and easy to use. If you use any Google products like Gmail, Google Drive, Google+/Hangouts, or Google Voice, then this is the browser for you.  Sign in to your Google account and you can sync your browsing over all of your computers and devices that are also logged into Google.  Have windows open on your computer but need to...
New website launched for Iron Rider TV

New website launched for Iron Rider TV

A website about motorcycle culture and the “ride life.” Iron Rider TV is an upcoming TV show about motorcycles, their riders and their culture.  The show is designed to show the many, diverse types of people who live the “ride life” and their many different cultures.  Their website explains what the show is about and has bio pages for each of the different members of the crew. The dark design of their website matches their killer logo and looks as cool as the bikes they’ll be featuring on the show.  They loved the way it turned out but we’re nowhere near finished!  Once the show hits the air we’ll be adding clips of the show and a “Featured Rides” photo gallery where they’ll be able to show off some of the amazing motorcycles they see during filming. Check it out at...
Optimized Images = Faster Website

Optimized Images = Faster Website

Having great looking pictures on your website is important. Too many large pictures and graphics however, can really slow down your website. Most digital cameras and smartphones these days take pictures that are much larger than necessary for web use.  If you plan on using your pictures online you should definitely do some optimizing first. It is important to understand how to optimize your images before loading them onto your website so that your pages load quickly without sacrificing quality.  If you use image editing software, such as Photoshop, you’ll have many tools for controlling image size.  The popular free alternative to Photoshop called GIMP has similar tools for image resizing.  Apple’s free program Preview can also resize images for reducing file size. Even without image editing software there are many easy alternatives you can use to optimize your images on-line. Here are a couple of great on-line services that will help you optimize your images quickly and easily. JPG Images – JPEG Optimizer Here is an example of a JPG image that was run through the free on-line image optimizer JPEG Optimizer. It’s original size was 4672 x 3104 pixels at a whopping 4.4 MB. After uploading the original file I opted to resize the image to a max width of 900 pixels with 65% compression. With these settings it was able to reduce the file size by 99%!   Not only did it reduce the file size by 99% but it still looks great.  Here are the original and the optimized images side by side. Can you tell which one has been optimized?   PNG Images –...
Animal Emergency Center Website Refresh

Animal Emergency Center Website Refresh

The Animal Emergency Center from Bend, Oregon already had a website, but it was in need of a little work.  The website was about 5 years old and some of the information was outdated so it was time to do some updating. With the original website design, they would have needed to know how to edit the HTML files to make updates.  To make sure this didn’t happen again, part of our redesign included a design that allows them to go in and make updates on their own if they want. Here are some before and after screenshots of their website:                   A couple other things we added to the website during the redesign were a contact form so it is easy for people to contact the clinic and a custom made Google map with on-page driving directions on how to get to the clinic. Coming soon will be the new web video we’re producing for them.  The video will give you a behind-the-scenes look at the clinic. Once we’re done we’ll let you know so you can see how it turned out. The Animal Emergency Center is located in Bend, Oregon in the Scandia Shopping center right behind Zooka Dental.  Check out their new website design at www.bendanimalemergency.com and let us know what you think of their new...