When i decided to make a charity website, first thing I did was to look for inspirations online. I found a few gems that convinced me to transform my idea into a full-fledged website. Here’s the list of a few websites that are not only exceptionally well-made, but also doing some great work towards different noble causes:
There’s a nasty rumour going around that WordPress is beautifully set up for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) “out of the box.” We’re all fans of WordPress – but the core software does need a little editing in the right direction when it comes to SEO.
Avoid making the following common mistakes while creating your website:
Categories and tags offer up opportunities for increased engagement and traffic that most bloggers waste. There are many benefits to creating and maintaining a well thought out category and tagging system when blogging. For one, the user experience can be vastly improved by well-constructed navigational elements. But secondly, categories and tags offer an opportunity to increase traffic to your site via search engines. One client of mine runs a large blog that attracts around 250,000 unique visitors per month. Around 5% of those visitors are referred by tag pages listed in search engines. And those visitors are far more engaged than the average, with higher time on site and page views, and a lower bounce rate. That’s an extra 10,000 engaged visitors per month, and this is for a site which is poorly optimized for tagging. So, if you’re interested in improving the user experience and boosting traffic to your site, read on to find out how you should optimize your categories and tags in WordPress.
The first step in website optimization is to choose the right keywords. The keywords that are chosen should be used within all of your content on your site, in your titles and URL and anywhere else that you are leaving your mark. These keywords will help your site show when a consumer searches so your site will be the one they click. You can use keywords you feel people would search for and compare with a keyword tool to come up with the best terms for your products and services.
When considering important aspects of the SEO of any site, the permalink plays major role in overall optimization. A permalink is a permanent link of your page and posts, and it doesn’t change with time. It is highly recommended to change your permalinks under WordPress dashboard > Settings > Permalink. Try not to use numbers in your permalink, because in the future if you want to extend the article by adding plugins or sites or additional information, your number will no longer make sense. Adding a relevant meta description will give more insight about your page to search engine bots. I suggest that you use your keyword in your meta title, meta description and meta keyword field along with an H1 tag. Also, try to write more SEO friendly articles by using H1, H2 and H3 tags. However, don’t overuse heading tags, as improper headings and too many H2 or H3 tags can lead to a negative ranking.
Your site’s tagline is something you have control over, even if you can’t change the name of the company or controlling entity for the site. The tagline is your opportunity to use the top keywords by which you’d like your home page to be found in search. It’s also the best tool you have to communicate relevance to your visitors so they understand how your site can help them… and that’s often what decides whether or not they stay on the site or leave it. As you can see, the tagline is vital. Getting it right is not easy: it has to be short, pithy, relevant and it must contain your top keyword.
Watch this video to know more about SEO and how it functions…
With unlimited options of WordPress themes to choose from, it becomes difficult to select the right theme. Here’s the checklist of what you need to consider while you sift through the pool of themes:
1. Price: Free Vs. Premium Themes
To start off, let’s answer one of the most common questions asked: Is it worth paying for a WordPress theme, or can you get away with a free one? Long gone the era when free themes were poorly coded, now you can get well-developed themes without having to pay for it. However, surely there are benefits involved if you go for premium themes like – paid themes are more updated than free themes; premium themes come with proper documentation detailing the customization process; also premium themes are creatively designed and less recognizable.
2. Check for Browser Compatibility
Always make sure that your theme is compatible with all the browsers. Some people might suggest that you should not worry about older browsers like IE 6 if it doesn’t work. And most tech designers are now ignoring Internet Explorer compatibility completely. But, smart thing is to keep a larger audience in mind that would most certainly include internet explorer users.
3. Will you be extending your Theme?
It is not plausible that you can edit the theme as you want after making it final. WordPress themes have edit options but if keep on adding new features than the size and where to place the functionality needs a thought. If you want to extend the functionality of theme too much then you must have a very simple design that is very lightweight and offers simple navigations. Themes with simple design allow you to add more functionality when you want to customize it. If you have chosen a theme with many features than adding the new functionality will be very limited.
4. Do they offer support?
You should look out if they offer support or not as you can face some difficulties. Some developers so not offer any type of support. All you can do is post a question and wait if someone has a solution to your problem. Website that offer premium themes most likely offer support and they would respond quickly if you face some difficulty.
5. Speed: Lightweight Vs. Feature-Heavy Themes
Fast page-loading speed does not just improve the general user experience of a website, but has also been confirmed to improve search engine rankings, conversion rates and, thus, online revenue. It should come as no surprise that I recommended avoiding sluggish themes like the plague. Understanding a problem is the first step to avoiding it. So, what causes a theme to drag a website’s page speed into the gutter?
In general, it comes down to three things:
Be wary of themes that boast 10 different sliders, 20 preinstalled plugins and a lot of JavaScript animation. While this might sound like a good deal, no website that makes HTTP requests to 50 JavaScript files will run optimally.
The keyword here is “overuse,” which admittedly is a bit subjective. Try to steer clear of themes that use a lot of full-width images, background videos, etc. Less is more.
From wildly scaled images to inline CSS injection, poor coding has a significant impact on website performance. As mentioned, poor code usually means that a theme hasn’t been updated in a long time, so always check a theme’s update history. Don’t lose hope if you end up not liking your theme, there is always a way to change to something better. Read up more about things you must do before changing your theme. http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/checklist-15-things-you-must-do-before-changing-wordpress-themes/
Mistakes are likely to happen, but don’t fret, just learn from them instead. Oscar Wilde says it very nicely: “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes”. However, it is much more efficient to learn from the mistakes of others. In this article, I have listed common WordPress mistakes that beginners make.
When you install WordPress, it automatically creates the username “admin” with administrator privileges. It’s the username that is obviously predictable to hackers. Using the “admin” username, they can easily perform a brute force attack to crack your login and take control over your site. As WordPress gives you the option to change the username during installation, it doesn’t make sense to stick with the default one. Therefore, while installing WordPress, make sure to change your default WordPress admin username to a different username. Also, use a combination of numbers, letters and special characters in your username and password.
Choosing the perfect theme is a crucial thing that decides the future your WordPress blog. You wouldn’t believe that the structure of your design plays a vital role in search engine rankling. There are three things you should keep in mind while picking a theme – the ease of use for you, a reasonable price, and a reputed company. If you’re looking for a free WordPress theme, then there is no better option than WordPress Themes Directory. But if you’re interested in purchasing a commercial theme, we recommend you to give a try to any one of these trusted theme providers: Elegant Themes, StudioPress, Headway Themes, Themify, or ithemes.
The Favicon is considered as the identity card of your website. It’s a little icon associated with your site, typically displayed in the browser’s address bar or next to the site name in a list of bookmarks. Mostly WordPress newbies ignore their favicons, so their blogs/sites usually have favicons displayed by WordPress as default, or provided by their Theme Company or Web Hosting Provider. To look more professional, you really need to change your favicon right now if you haven’t already. You can either make a favicon by yourself, or create one using one of the free favicon generators available around the web. Once you’ve generated your favicon, you need to upload it in the images section of your theme in order to replace the default one.
A permalink is a permanent static hyperlink to a specific blog post in your WordPress blog. You would probably have noticed that WordPress default permalink structure is something like http://www.yoursite.com/?p=123. Not only does this look awkward, but also bad for SEO and users. A user and search-engine friendly permalink structure doesn’t only help you get ranked higher in search engines, but also shows your professionalism to your readers. After you’ve installed WordPress, never forget to make changes to your permalinks structure, by going under Settings » Permalinks. To get the most out of your SEO efforts, use appropriate keywords in your permalink structure.
WordPress has got updated more than 20 times, since it’s launched. WordPress core developers and contributors are constantly working to improve its speed, efficiency and user-interface. Whenever a vulnerability or bug is found, it gets a new update. Ignoring a WordPress update can result into a security vulnerability and make hackers’ lives easier as well. Many people think that their WordPress site may break while performing an update, but that’s just a myth. If your theme and plug-ins are coded in a proper way, then your site will never break. Never forget, a newer version is created for a genuine reason. Therefore, you should never ignore a WordPress update.
One of the big mistakes that we all usually make is not creating a backup of our WordPress site. We realize the importance of WordPress backups, only when we lose our years of hard work within a few seconds, and then need a backup to restore things back to normal at that time. Therefore, it’s highly recommended to have a manual/automatic backup of your WordPress site, especially when you’re going to perform an update. Having a proper backup of your WordPress site is a must, as crashes may happen any time. As nothing is 100% foolproof in the world of technology, make sure you’re prepared to avoid that painful situation – loss of your valuable data. If you’re using WordPress.com platform, you can easily backup your blog by going to Tools, and then “Export” in dashboard. For self-hosted WordPress.org, you can use phpMyAdmin tool, or an online service such as VaultPress, or a backup plug-in such as BackupBuddy and BackWPup.
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