How to add a custom sidebar (Widget Area) to your WordPress Website

How to, Web Design, Web Development, WordPress

Do you have a WordPress website where each page has the same content in your sidebar? Have you ever wanted to have different content from page to page, but not sure how to do it? Well this post is for you.

Woo Themes has a really simple plugin that will allow you to create your own custom sidebars or widget areas for your website. You’ll be able to name each widget area whatever you like, and even assign it to your already created pages. See the video for a quick walk-through on installing the plugin and configuring a widget area.

Want to get a copy of this plugin to download now; follow this link to the WordPress repository and get your copy today. Oh and be sure to give a shout out to the guys at Woo Themes for making our lives easier!

Measuring Your Web Content’s SEO Value

Blog, Product Reviews, Web Design, Web Development

Most people are familiar with the term search engine optimization, or commonly termed, SEO.  This is a critical aspect in both design and success of your websites content and drawing people to it via search rankings. So consider it not the roof of the house but truly a part of the foundational structure of your website.  And there are great rewards if your website contains SEO rich keywording and proper tags.

“A website isn’t worth having, if no one can find it!

So if you really want to build traffic to your website or blog, you will be thinking of SEO as something paramount to your site’s developments. Majority of webmasters only do the things required to gain a good amount of search engine traffic, but very little actually measure their site’s SEO value.

You Are Being Out Ranked!
One of the best articles I’ve read about rankings comes for the industry gurus of HubSpot.  Rebecca Churt’s blog titled, “How to Conduct a Competitive SEO Audit to Outrank Industry Rivals” says it all.  In this article, she lists 5 Simple Steps to Perform Your Own Competitive SEO Analysis which include:
-articulate your buyer personas;
-identify key competitors;
-explore what the competition looks like; and more!

Measuring via Your Analytics

So much data is now available through the various analytics systems, and the one most commonly used (and respected) is Google Analytics.  The key to successful utilization of it is to focus on the data that matters most. By focusing on the reporting metrics, you can get a sense of the true ROI and the value of your SEO efforts.  Start your analysis by looking at the number of visitors to your site, where they came from, and most importantly, what search terms they used.  Just this preliminary information alone, will tell you is how well you are doing  at getting more people to visit your website while increasing the visibility of your business and/or service.

What’s the Hook in Link Building?

Within the SEO communities, you will often hear the term “links” and/ or link building.  What that really means is that a link from another website links to your company’s site.  SEO link building requires that the site linking to yours must indeed be trustworthy link and furthermore, related to your business. Valuable links come from trusted sites like:

  • Educational institutions that your company has a relationship with;
  • Local and national organizations you or your company has an affiliation to;
  • Any number of relatively unknown but reputable business and industry-related directories;
  • Similar industry online publications; and more!

The Key is Keywords

While considering the written content of your website, make a conscious selections of commonly used keywords and phrases to increase your chances of climbing the search engine ranks.  Think of yourself as the consumer and even consider looking up certain terms in a Thesaurus to determine commonly used words that most users in your industry might use.  A test run on your success at this would be search engine sites and paste them in the major search engine sites you want to be found on, then hit the search button. Whatever page your site is will determine how effective your SEO investments are.

Honk Your Horn For More Traffic!

Increased traffic for your website and if you’re not getting enough of traffic as evidenced by your analytics, it means you need to tweak your process (eg, keywording) and do more optimization. Try keeping a record (easy enough in an Excel spreadsheet) how much traffic your website increases after each new method is implemented.  Then move forward, scale back or consider a new method based on the data collected and analyzed.  This is a simple way to determine the true value of your SEO efforts.

The Sum of it All

SEO is instrumental to content builders whether you are a web designer or blogger.  We don’t have the luxury of ignoring the SEO value of our websites; investing time and resources into a zero-yielding ROI and a non-existent consumer base.

My WordPress Site Just Got Hacked

All Posts, Security, Web Design, Web Development, WordPress

Probably a phrase that no one in the community ever wants to utter. I bet you’ll probably stop reading this post temporarily just to take a look at your website to ensure that it is still up and in-tact. Some of you may even clear your cache and refresh to be double sure. Does this type of thing happen often, yes! Does this happen to anyone or just you? If you’ve been hacked before it sure feels like it was just you out of the millions of active websites on the interwebs. You can’t feel too bad about it, it was probably bound to happen if you have never thought to make the necessary steps to keep your website secure.

So what do you do now that your staring at some ugly graphics and text that reconfirms the obvious that your website has been hacked? Check out this list of options below:

Contact Your Hosting Company

Inform them that your website has been compromised so that they may be able to take steps to isolate the problem to a specific server or files before it spills over into your neighbors yard. Most websites operate on shared servers. This means on any given server there could be multiple websites of all types sharing space. Kind of like the electrical box outside your house.

Protect Your Own Computer

Once you’ve learned that your website has in fact been hacked, trying to navigate around it may not be wise as files may be compromised. Clicking on links or images may unload spyware or malware to your local computer that may wreak havoc on your home/work network and systems.

Pull Up A Backup of Your Database or Website

This of course is considering you set a plan for backups to your website on some type of regular basis. We use a plugin called WordPress Database Backup from Austin Matzko, however that plugin hasn’t been updated in a while. So I’d suggest BackWPup by Inpsyde. There’s a host of options including backing up to your Dropbox account. You can also perform your own backups by heading over to the Tools section, then clicking on the Export option and saving that to your local computer. Now if you do have a backup, you’ll be using the same plugin for backing up (in some cases) and choosing the import feature, or using the native import feature through the Tools section in your WordPress dashboard.

Get A Fresh Copy of WordPress

Go to WordPress.org and get yourself a fresh copy of whatever current version is out at the moment. There are a few files however that you’re not going to want to alter as they will consist of vital data pertaining to your website.

  • wp-config.php (contains your database, host, password, and more)
  • wp-content (FOLDER) (this is where your themes and plugins are stored)

There are a few files that you should delete regardless if your site is new, hacked, or not:

  • wp-admin/install.php
  • wp-admin/install-helper.php
  • wp-admin/import.php
  • readme.html
  • wp-admin/upgrade.php
  • wp-admin/upgrade-functions.php

If you’re not sure, make a copy while your in your FTP to your server side and rename the parent folders to :whatevername.old” or “whateverfile.php.old”. This way when you upload new files you won’t overwrite the preserved ones and you’ll still have fresh files loaded where compromised ones may have been.

Change Your Database Password

This same password is listed in your WP-CONFIG.php file so you’ll need to go through your host control panel to edit your MySQL database to edit this. Once updated to something WAY more secure and different, edit the password in your wp-config.php file and re-upload that to your server. I shouldn’t stress that this shouldn’t be the same password as your Dashboard user login.

Speaking of users, be sure that you are NOT using the default “admin” account to login to your site. If so please create a new login with a better username like your nickname plus favorite 5 digit number, add in some spaces and a few capital letters while you’re at it. Brute force attacks on WordPress sites are common and over 90% of the time they are trying under the “admin” username.

Be sure you’re using the most udpated version of PHP. Could be 5.2 or 5.4. Check with your hosting company as well as your theme to be sure you’re where you need to be.

Login to WordPress and Check Around

See if there are any new users accounts (especially administrator ones) that you know shouldn’t be there. Update the passwords on the remaining ones you know are authorized. See if there are any new pages, posts, media files, etc that you know you didn’t load. Remove them too. If you did preserve some files or folders, you may have to reload your theme(s) and plugins. Not a big deal since you’ll easily be able to see them from your preserved files/folders.

Keep Up To Date

Be sure to keep in-step with security updates from WordPress. If you ever see a 3.x.x update, chances are is a vulnerability update and it will be an update to patch  something that someone from Automattic or the WordPress community has discovered. Also check in on your plugins and themes to see if they have updates. Most theme houses like Themeforest or WooThemes will contact you via email whenever there are updates pushed by the submitting developers. If not, take some steps to stay up to date on your own. Beware of some free themes you find on the net too. There usually is no accountability or liability should that theme go un-updated for months or years yet still be available as free. Or worse yet, repackaged and loaded on other sites as a free theme yet its now loaded with malware.

Install Preventative Security Plugins

While there are a host of plugins you can choose from, some free, some premium; GET SOME! I’m more of a fan of premium plugins from respectable developers versus free ones because truly, you get what you pay for. The level of responsibility from premium developers to ones just starting out is quite noticeable and to be respected. So what should you use? Here are some suggestions:

Better WP Security

WordFence Security (we also talked about this here)

BulletProof Security

XCloner – Backup and Restore

Have you had a site get hacked? Have more ways to prevent a site from getting hacked? Share in the comments below!

 

Some useful links and further tips:

Hardening WordPress

 

Make Life Easy WP Plugins

Product Reviews, Social Media, Web Design, Web Development, WordPress

If you’re a web designer or blogger, you know that WordPress (WP) has quickly become one of the fastest growing, most popular content management systems (CMS) around.  It’s extremely quick to install as well as easy to navigate and master.  And they are consistently evolving across all platforms with simple-to-use themes as well as free updates and plugins that are only a few clicks away via the dashboard  Most of us WP users and web designers purchase a theme with majority of the bells & whistles we think we’ll need.  But sometimes the theme falls short, you need your website to have certain functionality that you could not have foreseen needing or you need to add functionality at the behest of your client.  So this is where plugins plug in-filling in the gap between wishing and less limitations.

In the last year, I’ve begun having more fun in the dashboard and realize that I’ve been missing out on all the cool plugins that make building/editing a site more efficient as well as functional.  Some are tried and true while others are indeed new.  So here’s my list of my favorite WordPress plugins to date.

All-in-One SEO Pack –  All in One SEO Pack Pro v2.1 improves on the most popular WordPress SEO plugin.  Not only can you set site-wide defaults in WordPress as well as customize the search engine settings for each individual WordPress post, page and custom post type but now you can manage exactly how search engines crawl each page or post.  All in One SEO Pack Pro even gives you complete control over your social meta or OpenGraph meta so you can control what appears on your favorite social media sites.

Custom Link Widget –  A Simple, straight-forward plugin that lets you insert links as the widget. Just insert your link, name it and it will convert it to a hyperlink automatically.

Image Widget – A simple image widget that uses the native WordPress media manager to add image widgets to your site.  It automatically resizes and aligns your image, allows you to link the image and even allows you to override your theme template!

Post Types Order – You can custom order the posts without making any php file changes or publish date resetting.  Simply install plugin, drag & drop.

Widget Logic – This widget gives you extra control field called “Widget logic” that lets you control the pages that the widget will appear on.

Ultimate TinyMCE – A chock full kitchen sink of editorial/functional options.

WP Touch – This plugin reformats your website to a mobile site for easy navigation & shortcuts on Apple iPhone / iPod touch, Google Android, Blackberry Storm and Torch, Palm Pre and other touchscreen smartphones.

Acurax Social Media Widget – This so ridiculously simple plugin lets you define the icon style & add multiple social media linked icons to your Twitter,Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube,RSS Feed,Linkedin, and Google+.

TweetMeme Retweet Button – adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.

So there you have it – just a few ways to make WordPress work better for you.

I’d love to hear your faves – which are some of your favorite plugins?

How To: Add A Menu To Your WordPress Theme

All Posts, How to, Web Development, WordPress

Have you ever installed a new WordPress theme that didn’t have native support for creating and selecting custom menu (navigation bar). Now before you jump in be sure to either do a backup of your files, or as you get to the Functions.php and Header.php files copy the original code to a text editor before you modify it. Once you’ve done these preventative “CYA” measures follow these steps below:

From your Dashboard menu, go to Appearance > Edit and add the code below to the theme’s functions.php file: (in some cases I’ve seen this called “Theme Options” just above where it says “functions.php”. This is the same thing.)

You can add this code below towards the bottom of your page code so that you can easily find it later should you need to reference it.

add_theme_support( ‘menus’ );

(you may need to add this on the next line if you get to the end and your menu doesn’t show up:

add_action( ‘init’, ‘register_my_menus’ );

function register_my_menus() {
register_nav_menus(
array(
‘menu-1’ => __( ‘Menu 1’ ),
)
);
}

User your browser’s Find feature and search for this code in your theme’s Header.php file:

<?php wp_list_pages(‘title_li=&depth=1’); ?>

Highlight this string of code and replace it with this code below:

<?php wp_nav_menu( array( ‘sort_column’ => ‘menu_order’, ‘container_class’ => ‘menu-header’ ) ); ?>

Lastly click on Appearance then Menus and you should be able to create a custom menu.

The Experience of WordCamp Miami 2013

All Posts, Events, Web Development, WordPress

Well this past weekend was the annual WordCamp Miami at the University of Miami. If you read my previous post about the expectations, I’d like to report that they were all met and then some. The amount of developers on site was awesome. A lot of which you’ve read blog posts from, heard about through plugins and software you’ve purchased and use, local, and abroad. The atmosphere was certainly electric.

Going I knew we’d be hit with a ton of information. Equipped with a few Macbook pros, tablets, chargers, and iPhones with MyWi for dedicated internet, we were ready for anything. We had cool badges with our names, Twitter handle, and QR Codes thanks to WP Beginner. Among that we were give a host of items from a cool reusable shopping bag from BlueHost to shot glasses from Woo Themes. Apparently they know that we developers appreciate a nice drink every now and again.

Since we went as a team we split up for most of Saturday’s sessions to try to cover as much as we could and collaborate later. It was totally worth it. Being three different tracks on Saturday and two on Sunday, needless to say there were a lot of options to choose from.

For those of you who didn’t make it, enjoy some of the pictures we took from our mobiles here. And if you’d like to see some of the recordings from the sessions, you can actually do so for FREE on the Live page of the WordCamp Miami website.