I was recently interviewed on a really well produced podcast called Hello Tech Pros. The creator is Chad Bostick, a fellow techie-guy as well as content creator of a 7 day a week podcast. That by itself is worth a second to imagine how much dedication one must have to have produce content like that on a daily basis.
The topic for me being on his show was for Motivation Monday, and I got really transparent with a pretty low experience I dealt with as a web designer. I spoke about what it felt like to be hacked, and continually hacked for about eight months of time relentlessly.
Listen in on the podcast to hear more about that story if you haven’t heard it from me personally. It’s worth your time I promise! And when you’re done visit the show notes page here for details.
If your website is built using WordPress, you’re probably going to want to get it indexed for Google in the best way possible. Using the Yoast SEO plugin will help you do just that and some more. It’s one of the leading SEO plugins for WordPress websites and widely used. In this video we discuss common questions people have about the plugin as well as best practices.
It’s been about four years now that we’ve been working exclusively in WordPress when building websites for clients. We switched over to it as a test with some websites that needed the ability to make content updates on a regular basis, then found it to be so much more resourceful than how we were building our regular HTML websites. And now WordPress sites take up about 26% of websites built on the internet. Pretty cool right?!
For those of you using WordPress though will want to make sure you’re always using the latest version of the platform. There are a few quick reasons why:
New Functions and Features – With the version updates usually brings new functionality that makes the commonly used tools and options even easier for content creators. Image galleries are easier than ever before, content formatting is better, and so are the themes.
Security and Patches – Typically you’ll see these in the incremental updates to the versions, but these are always important to pay attention to. Because WordPress is open sourced and community driven, input from users of the platform are actually taken into account when issues are found. Yes even the small little hiccups matter to the developers because they’re able to track and culminate all of that data and package fixes that are then pushed through these updates for all to enjoy.
What does this all mean? Don’t neglect your website. You may be one of the many owners that have several pending updates waiting for you to take action. Before you make those updates, be sure to read what is changing. It helps to understand this because there could be a reason why you shouldn’t update or possible test to see first if the updates will be compatible with your current theme, plugins, and custom settings.
You’ll want to check with your web consultant if you’re not sure, or you can always contact us and we can help with that too. Probably one of the more important things is to be sure and make a backup of your website prior to doing any updates. This could help in case something goes wrong or breaks, and then instead of troubleshooting, you can just restore a backup and then work out a plan for how to move forward.
Creating a new user profile is essential when you’re going to have multiple people accessing your website. Below are the available roles for user profiles and what access and rights they have.
Administrator – The main account(s) with access to everything. Usually reserved for your web designer, and site owner.
Author – Can create pages and posts and publish them without the need to have them reviewed.
Editor – These user profiles are mainly used for people who will be reviewing posts written by Contributors.
Contributor – May create new posts and submit them for review by Editors or Authors and above.
Subscriber – Mainly to view new content that is published to your website. May also receive email notifications for new posts.
Installing a new plugin for your WordPress site can be done in just a few minutes. You can either upload one from your computer that you’ve downloaded or search the WordPress repository for the plugin you’re looking to install directly to your website.
Follow the instructions in this video to install and activate your new plugin. If you have more questions or need help, be sure to add a comment below or visit our Contact page for support and we’d be happy to help.
