WordPress is a software that is constantly being upgraded and improved upon and if you’re wondering whether you should update your website to the latest version of WordPress, then the answer is yes! Why should you do so? Well, the seven reasons you will read about below will surely convince you as to why it is so crucial for you to stay up to date when it comes to your WordPress website.

In fact, neglecting updates will put your website at a risk of inconvenience and attacks. Here are the top seven reasons why you should have your WordPress website updated:

1. Superior Performance

Everyone wants their website to be equipped with high speed performance and ease of usage. Upon having your website updated, you will experience exactly that. An update will ensure that your users experience a superior and smooth performance each time they visit your website. Here are some examples of how previous updates have helped with enhanced performance:

• Sites using complex queries were at ease after WordPress 4.1
• With WordPress 4.2 came a superior JS performance for the navigation menus

When it comes down to SEO, quality performance is essential and after having your website upgraded, you will ensure it performs to the best of its potential.

2. An Enhanced Set of Features

When you update your WordPress website, you will gain access to a whole range of new and improved features that will make your website a lot more versatile, robust. You will be at liberty to perform tasks that you may not have been able to perform with older versions. WordPress 3.0 came with custom navigation menus and multi-site installations while 3.1 made it easy to navigate between sites by adding the Admin Bar and also improvised on internal linking.

As the updates keep rolling out, WordPress development escalates and the features get more and more impressive. WordPress 4.1 brought with itself inline image editing while much quicker plug-in updates were introduced with the arrival of 4.2.

3. A Website Richly Secured

WordPress as we all know is open source software and 23% websites from all over the world are powered by WordPress. Its popularity makes it more targeted by hackers and data thieves who can study source codes and use the information to break into websites. Security experts are capable of studying codes and they also report security fixes and bugs. Each time the security reaches a stage of vulnerability, it gets reported after which the WordPress team get to work so that an update can be released that is helpful with having the issues fixed.

To put it in simpler words, if you are using a version of WordPress that is not the latest, the software in use will be highly prone to security vulnerabilities. So stay up to date with WordPress themes, its core and plug-ins so that nasty and malicious hackers can be kept at bay and you can rest assured that your website is safe and secure.

4. Guaranteed Compatibility

You need to know how to update your WordPress website properly so that you can make sure the software is compatible with plug-ins. If you install a plug-in that is brand new while using an old version of WordPress, it may not be compatible to the new plug-in and you will most likely be required to update the version you are currently using so as to ensure its compatibility with the new plug-ins you’ve installed. In addition to this, you will not be able to take advantage of the latest features associated with the updated version either.

5. Bug Fixtures

One of the main reasons for upgraded versions of WordPress is to have the bugs fixed. At times it so happens that bugs seem to slip in through cracks which is why minor releases of WordPress seem to take place so that the bugs can be cleaned out. Why was the recent update of 4.2.3 released? So that it could fix up some 20 bugs that had got into the 4.2 release. If you are facing some issues, you know it’s time to make the change to the newer, latest version of WordPress.

6. Adaptability to Change

Some of you may be comfortable with the version you are using and may not want to make the shift to the newer version of WordPress on your website. But you must understand that the updated versions hold the best of everything WordPress software is capable of delivering and for this reason you must make the shift. At some point or the other, you will need to make a change and keeping your website updated will make you more comfortable with experiencing changes that are so necessary to ensure the effective and efficient functionality of WordPress.

7. Visitors Well Treated

Websites are not created aimlessly. No matter what the reason, be is simply for fulfilling the content appetite of your readers, or for generating income, in order to satisfy the needs of your visitors, you will need to stay on top of your game. One crucial way of doing so is by updating your WordPress website.

If the version you are currently using is old, it will obviously not be equipped with the newest features, bug fixes or security needed for enriched performance. This will no doubt lead your visitors to get frustrated with your website and do you think they will be visiting it again? Well you know the answer to this question. And if your website traffic seems to be facing a decline, it’s needless to say that your business won’t exactly be performing very well. So use the updated version of WordPress and keep your visitors happy.

The above mentioned reasons are clear cut motives loaded with an abundance of benefits associated with updated versions of WordPress. So move on to better performance, security, features and compatibility and ensure visitors keep coming back to you by staying up to date with your WordPress website.

The post 7 Reasons To Update Your WordPress Website appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

WordPress has successfully evolved as a reputed and ideal platform among the startup business owners and developers due to bundle of infinite features associated with it. It accounts for majority of the websites present on the World Wide Web and thousands of new sites are developed on this platform and the latest statistics exhibits that the percentage of WordPress sites will continue to increase in coming days due to its highly interactive and user friendly CMS (content management system)..

Due to the consistent growth of WordPress among the website owners, it becomes necessary for them to learn effective tips for saving time and increasing their productivity on their WordPress sites. Although you will find numerous tips on the internet, I have selected 6 killer tips that are proven to be successful to save time and boost productivity of your WordPress site.

1.Eliminate “Uncategorized” Category from WordPress Blog

When we install WordPress blog, it displays an “uncategorized” category by default for all your posts except when we modify or change the category to some other appropriate category. If you will not modify the category, then the post will automatically falls under the uncategorized section and hence if you want to avert this from happening, you can either change the default category to some relevant category or you can visit the “Writing Settings”, to modify the Default category to other categories like “Articles” or “General”.

By making changes in the Writing Settings section, it will ascertain that if you forget to select the categories of your posts, they will not fall under the “Uncategorized” section.

2.Enable Distraction Free Writing Mode

For authors or writers, it becomes necessary to remain distraction free while writing a blog post because writing requires 100% concentration to avoid mistakes because there are times when writers get distracted and start omitting mistakes or checking other posts that are not relevant. These distractions directly impact their productivity.

WordPress dashboard offers a very impressive feature for preventing these types of distractions and boosting the productivity of writers, which is known as Distraction Free Writing Mode. While writing log posts in the editor section of WordPress dashboard, you will find button on the right corner of your Visual Editor located just below the “text” tab.

When you will click on this button, it will make the Visual Editor full screen with all the necessary formatting options available. After completing the writing part, you can go back to the previous screen by clicking on the button again.

3.Don’t Invest More Time in Sourcing Images

When you search for perfect picture or image, it might take more time than your expectations and hence, you can easily lessen the time required for searching high quality images by using simple and effective plugins like Flickr Pick a Picture (helps in finding impressive pictures and images from Flickr from your WordPress dashboard), or Photo Dropper (that let you search pictures from Flickr without incurring any charges).

The interface of Flickr-Pick a Picture plugin looks like this:

4.Use Auto Embeds or Shortcodes for Inserting Media

Most of times we have to add audio or video clips to our blog posts to present more detailed information about something. In such cases, you can use the Shortcodes for inserting the media files into your post.

There are numerous shortcodes available that you can use for adding an image gallery, an audio clip or video clip in your post. These shortcodes are present in the post editor. The most used shortcodes for integrating audio, video or image in blog posts are listed as follows:

• [Video] -for displaying the video gallery in your blog post
• [Audio] -for displaying the audio gallery in your blog post
• [Gallery]- for displaying gallery of pictures in your blog post

You can also use the shortcodes in your Visual Editor directly either in text or visual mode.

Besides, you can also use auto-embed feature for integrating video clips to your posts. This is better than shortcodes and you simply have to paste the URL of the video for embedding in your posts. WordPress supports numerous video sites like YouTube.

5.Create Analytics in the WordPress Dashboard

The major concern of bloggers is to check the statistics to know the user engagement ratio on their posts. However, checking the statistics on regular basis impacts the overall productivity of bloggers.

To save time involved in evaluating statistics, it is better to use Google Analytics Dashboard that acts as your partial rescue by loading your analytics data in your WordPress dashboard directly. It means you are saved from opening a new tab and logging to your Google Analytics account repeatedly. You can also use other plugins for keeping a check on the statistics of your blog posts like WP statistics, Jet Pack Site Stats, or Wassup Real Time Analytics.

6.Change Your Standard Post into a “Sticky” Post

Sometimes some of your resource posts that you have posted on site get immense user attention due to their content and information. You can use this opportunity to increase the readers stay time on your website by making your resource post or standard post into a sticky post. Moreover, it will also help in increasing the stay time of readers on your site, which is very useful for enhancing the revenue and conversions on your site.

For doing so, you simply have to search for the “Sticky” setting in the Publish Module where you will have to click on the Edit link that appears next to “Visibility: Public” and select “Stick to the front page”. Once you have done with the selection, you can click on the OK button followed by the Publish button to make your post sticky.

It will make your standard post appear on top of all other articles on your site’s homepage.

Wrap Up Note

The tips discussed above are not the only tips available for saving time and increasing productivity on your WordPress site, but the sole intention being discussing them is just to let you know how you can save your time while writing or editing posts on your WordPress site that directly affects the productivity.

If you have not implemented these tips yet on your WordPress site, you can start implementing them from now onwards to get effective results. In case, you know some other WordPress tips that are useful for boosting the productivity, you can share with us in the comment section given below.

The post 6 Essential WordPress Tips to Save Time and Boost Productivity appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Bloggers often have the common perception that it is not easy to get visitors on their blogs. But if you talk about the expert bloggers, then their perception is completely different as they think that bringing visitors to the blogs is not as complex as it is to engage them for longer duration. Most of the times, visitors comes to your website, but they don’t stay there for long.

Now, let’s proceed with the main topic of this post that is related with learning the tips for improving the page views and reducing the bounce rate in WordPress blogs. Before we start, it is necessary to know about both these terminologies: Page Views and Bounce Rate.

Page Views is the number of times the pages are viewed by visitors on your website and this is an important concept for the bloggers as it is not easy to attract the visitors to your blog pages.

On the other hand, Bounce Rate calculates the percentage of visitors who enter into your website and leave the site rather than viewing other web pages of your site. Now, when you have learned about these terminologies, you must be thinking about the tips that can help you in achieving what the title of this blog post reads? In today’s post, I am sharing some important tips that will help you to enhance the overall page views on your website and reduce the bounce rates as well.

1.Interlink Your Content

The best way to increase page views and minimize bounce rate is to interlink your blog posts with other posts. If you have interlinked your blog posts in an intelligent way, you are actually grabbing the attention of blog readers towards your website and in this way; you can also direct some traffic towards your old posts as well. Hence, the interlinking of your blog contents will not only help in enhancing the bounce rate on your site but it will also help in improving the ranking of your site in search results.

Besides manual interlinking, you can also use the SEO Smart links or insights plugins to auto interlink your blog posts in an optimized way.

2.Display the Similar Posts after the Post

This is something which is very important for decreasing the bounce rate on your website. The key reason why a user leaves your site after reading a blog post is because you are not displaying them any related posts or additional information. If you will display the list of similar posts or the popular blog posts, you will give them a chance to look for more information on these posts, that will not only give them ample time to spend on your site but will also motivate them to search for more information on your site, which is required for improving page views and decreasing the bounce rate.

For adding the related or popular posts to your blog, you can use different plugins like the YARPP that comes with an advanced algorithmic structure for choosing and displaying the related posts. You can also display the similar posts without using any plugin with the help of tags or category. You can also show the related posts by the same author as well.

3.Use Excerpts on Front/Archive Pages

Your blog’s home page is similar as the magazine’s front page. Hence, it better to avoid placing larger text posts on the home page, instead place excerpts on front/archive pages because it comes with two benefits:

• Reduces load time of the page
• It helps in increasing the page views

Therefore, it is advised not to show the entire length of your content on your blog’s home page. You can use “Read More” tag to overcome this issue as this will help in increasing the speed of your website. Suppose there is a blog post containing 25 pictures, and you are displaying 5 pictures randomly on one page. It will be an appalling experience for the readers and it might cause them to leave your website without going through the complete post.

Here is an example of a Sample Homepage of WordPress Genesis Framework, where the excerpts are displayed in the front page by using “Read More” tag.

WordPress developers don’t have to put extra effort for showing the related posts because there are many themes of WordPress that comes integrated with this option like Thesis, Genesis, and Headway etc.

4. Divide the Lengthy Posts

The page views can be improved drastically if you choose to split the lengthy posts into multiple posts. However, the split posts should be interlinked with each other to make it easy for the readers to locate the others. When you divide the posts, it is necessary to ensure that each of these single post can stands on its own. You should be careful while dividing the posts because if the single post has not enough content, then the readers might get pissed off by going through the smaller sections of the same post.

Splitting the posts into multiple posts offer a much better user experience to the visitors because not only it adds sense to personal reading, but it also help them to grab the information in an uncomplicated way.

5.Use Interactive Sidebar

Sidebar plays an important role in improving the page views and cutting the bounce rates hence, you can show the “popular posts” or the “most liked posts” on the sidebar. You can also customize your most liked or popular posts by week, month, or all time or you can also show you recent posts on single post pages. There are many websites that uses custom images for navigating to certain posts of their own. You can also use your side bar for adding other sections of your WordPress site.

Here is an example of an interactive sidebar on WordPress web page:

In a Nutshell

If you really want to enhance the number of visitors visited on your web pages and decrease the bounce rate, then you must offer a better user experience to your readers. You can do so by avoiding cluttered web designs like avoid using many advertisements, or long posts. Instead, you can improve the loading time of your website by using the excerpts to make their reading experience more enjoyable. If you will use these tips, you will definitely make the navigation of your site easier, which is ultimately required for increasing the page views and reducing the bounce rate on your site.

If you have any other tips in your mind that can help the WordPress bloggers one or other way, please share in the comment section given below.

The post 5 Tips to Improve Page Views & Reduce Bounce Rate in WordPress appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

One of the advantage of using WordPress platform is the fact that it has plenty of quality free themes, along with custom and premium themes. A good theme of any website not only improves its first impression, but also helps in search engine optimization. With plethora of WordPress themes, choosing the right for your business can be a time taking task. After reading this article, you can easily choose a perfect theme that is worth your time, business and money. Here are some tips to spot the best themes for your WordPress website:

1.Know the Reason of Making Website

First and foremost thing that helps in choosing a theme is to identify the main purpose of your website. For instance, if the main aim of your website is to collect the email addresses for the future promotions then ‘Generate theme by StudioPress’ may be the best option for you. Further, if you want to create a wedding website, then the ‘Luscious theme’ may be the perfect option because of its bright colors. Therefore, you should know the purpose of making a website that will help in easing the task of searching suitable theme.

While thinking about your website purpose, you also need to be acquainted with whether you intend to monetize it, and if yes, what procedures you might use to do it. For instance, if you are planning to use Google Adsense in the future, make sure to choose a theme that provides enough space to insert the appropriate ads. Furthermore, it is also important to estimate how your site will grow. You should also find out answers of questions like “Will my theme give me enough space to develop the website, or do my current needs already max out its features? You should choose a theme that gives you the opportunity to expand on the functionality and size of your site in the future.

2.Note Down the Features You Need

It is always good to choose a theme that comprises all the features that you desire. It will also save your time and money from unwanted design customization after the installation of theme. Customization of free themes can be more challenging, as they may not give you as many options of customization through the WordPress admin panel. Therefore, for the average WordPress users (who have little knowledge about theme customization), I would suggest finding a theme which comprises all your desired features.

Further, the admin panel of WordPress allows you to filter themes by your desired features. Just go to Appearance >> Themes >> Install Themes and you will find this filter.

In addition to this, you should note down all the information about the styles, which should include:

• Price and certificate
• Personalized design
• Different colors available
• Easily flexible headlines
• Widget-ready areas
• Customized website assistance
• Video and picture helpful
• Assistance for social networking incorporation

3.Select SEO Friendly Theme

While selecting themes, you should always check if they are search engine friendly or not. SEO friendly themes are important for your website as well as business growth. You can also optimize your website with various SEO tricks, but it is always better to start with a SEO-friendly theme to save you time, effort and money. If you don’t know the way to choose SEO friendly theme, following tips can help you a lot:

• Page loading speed– You can run the theme’s demo page to see how promptly the theme loads. The ideal time of loading is below 1.5 seconds. You should not select those themes that come with all kinds of bells and whistles which result in a slow speed of page loading.

• Clear coding- Poor coding of any theme results lots of issues, such as easy for hackers to breach your site, cross-browser design issues and slower loading speeds. All of these issues impact on SEO; therefore it is required to ensure that your WordPress theme is coded with great care, and in HTML5 and CSS3.

• Responsive Design- With rise of smartphones, demands for mobile friendly sites are increasing with great pace. Responsive design of any website also affect its SEO, therefore, you should choose only responsive themes for your website.

• Site Architecture- Since the Panda Update of Google, site architecture plays an important for SEO. Your theme will largely responsible for the structuring of internal linking, navigation, and the hierarchy of your content. You should make sure that no web page is more than 3 clicks away from the home page.

• Social Integration- You should choose only those themes that encourage social sharing and enable authorship and social meta data. Choose those themes which shows social sharing buttons in a clean and attractive manner, so that users can easily share the post from whatever point in the article.

• Microdata Markup– If you are planning to run a website with reviews or recipes, you should aim to find theme that supports adding microdata, so that search engines can display your rich snippet data or star ratings in their ranking pages.

4.Know Your Budget

The WordPress themes vary in costs. While some themes are free, others cost you hundreds of dollars. Premium themes of WordPress require payment; therefore, it is required to know your budget before selecting the themes. Further, not all themes can be bought completely, as some themes are only licensed for limited time period. While choosing a paid theme for your website, you should pay attention to whether this theme requires a one-time payment, or whether you will need to renew its license after fixed time period.

5.Explore Themes from Multiple Galleries

You should check out multiple galleries and marketplaces for themes to compare designs and features. For instance, it is possible to find a theme design which you like in a free gallery, but after that you notice that it lacks a good admin panel and some functionality that you needed.

By looking at multiple theme galleries, you are likely to find an appropriate and optimum theme with a similar look that offers more value. There are many free themes available in marketplace that mimic the look of popular premium and paid themes. At the same time, you should be aware of many theme websites, as the themes of these sites can contain hidden links or malicious code. For your simplicity, I have listed some trusted places of themes:

• WordPress Theme Directory (free)
• Web2Feel (free)
• WordPress.com Theme Showcase
• ThemeForest
• WooThemes
• ThemeTrust
• ElegantThemes
• Obox
• Themify
• GraphPaperPress

6.Plugins are Important Criteria for Selecting Themes

Almost every theme in WordPress comes with plugins, but extended functionality is always an important aspect before choosing theme and it is here that some themes outshine others. You should take a closer look at your themes, stringently assess their utility, and see whether the developers of theme had gone the extra mile to create customize extensions for that theme.

The first thing to check out is a good variety in plugins. You can choose themes that are most considerate of your needs by checking the number of plugins. Some plugins can be more useful than others. You should choose those themes that have plugins which can satiate your demands. For instance, there are various plugins that help you to administrate your website. You could also be benefitted from an analytics plugin and perhaps an easy-to-manage plugin for improving the comment system in your webpage.

7.Read Reviews of Customers

Many WordPress themes give you the option to try before you buy. You should take a tour of the control panel of theme and check out the features, customization options, and how your website would look like.

With many trials you will never exactly know what kind of experience you will have until you have purchased it and can use it in full. Therefore, it is quite important to look at the reviews of customers for that particular theme, especially if you plan to pay for that theme. If any theme doesn’t have customer reviews, you can still look for the comments and evaluations of customers through a search on the search engines. You can also try searching “discussion of [insert theme name]” on Google. Many themes of WordPress come with support forums where you can easily discuss about the theme and associated issues related to it. You can read lots of information about a theme by looking through the threads left on these discussion boards.

8.Read Service Terms of Themes

While choosing a free or commercial WordPress theme, you should be well aware of the terms of service. If a free theme requires a lot of back links, then you should move on. There are thousands of free themes in the market and you can pick another one. You should always follow the terms of service, as you should appreciate the work of all designers so that they can keep producing good themes for us.

Final Words:

Choosing a right theme for your WordPress website is essential for attracting visitors. As you can see you need to take several factors into consideration before selecting a WordPress theme, especially if you are running a business. If you do not have plenty of time to spend on tweaking theme, a free theme is ideal as it is quick to set up. I am sure above mentioned tips will ease your task of finding suitable WordPress theme that can satiate your need. You can share your views on these tips in the comment box, and if you have better ideas please do let us know.

The post Top Tips To Help You Choose The Best WordPress Theme appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Have you been tried often to take control over the admin area of your WordPress site, but failed to do so? You might have discovered that there are various needless items displayed in your WordPress Admin area that you don’t want your visitors to show. How you could hide these unnecessary items from showing in the admin area of your WordPress site? Is there any ideal solution for achieving so or you can use set of techniques for doing so?

The admin area of a WordPress sites has several aspects, which needs to be changed and there are many things that needs to be deactivated as well from the Admin area and for doing this you can use the Adminimize plugin of WordPress that helps you to take control of your WordPress site’s admin area with ease and convenience and you can also choose the user groups based on your preferences

What Is Adminimize and How It Works?

A WordPress plugin that helps you to take control over the admin area of your site and hide the unnecessary items from the Administration menu, the Adminimize plugin visually condenses the administrative header so that more content of the admin page becomes visible. Moreover, with this plugin, you can easily make the dashboard and admin page of your site as per your choice, but you must have to install this plugin first followed by its activation by going through Settings > Adminimize on your website’s dashboard.

You will find a Mini Menu on the Settings page that segregate the page into various sections for varied WordPress admin screens. When you click on any of this mini menu, you will be given with set of options and for every section, you will be offered with various items that you can easily modify or deactivate. Each of those options has checkboxes for different WordPress user roles.

The changes that you will make here will not be displayed in the admin page of the plugin, but you have to open the admin page of a new browser tab to see the changes in action.

What the Adminimize Plugin Can Do?

With the help of this plugin, you can easily hide the post Meta controls on the other areas and Write-page of the of the admin area for simplifying the editing interface. You can also configure the Meta boxes and switch off the elective Meta boxes in the write-area. Besides, this plugin also help in modifying the administration backend and lends you the power to dispense rights on certain parts. Here is an example that shows how you can select, which of the user groups will visualize the screen options and admin bar.

Other important things that you can do with the Adminimize plugin include:

• The Admins can conveniently activate and deactivate the different parts of the menu and sub-menu.
• Meta-fields can easily administer independently for pages and posts.
• You can deactivate specific parts of the write menu independently for non-admins and admins.
• You can minimize the header of the backend to give more spaces.
• The structure of the menu can be changed to make it more logical on each user basis so that every user can have their settings.
• The admin theme can also be set on each user basis by visiting the User Setting for making the changes.
• You can conveniently use the themes together with color settings for the new and classic themes.
• You can add different colors to the themes to make them look more attractive.
• With this plugin, you will be offered with a fresh menu structure that consists of classic menu options on the left hand side for writing and managing, while the right hand side is kept for design, settings, user settings, and plugins.
• This plugin makes the menu smaller by taking up less space and you can easily scroll the inputs fields as there is no need to create certain Write screen parts bigger.
• With this plugin, the categories have now shifted to the sidebar and the tags as well, while the editing part is auto-scrolled that makes sense especially when you are using small resolution.
• As soon this plugin becomes active and supports “Admin Drop Down Menu”, the user can choose from two more back-end themes.
• You can set the role for visualizing the areas on edit post, link page, and global.
• Majority of the changes happens only when it is required and only in the write screen.
• You can also add options on your own to set the rights for role.
• With this plugin, it is possible for you to deactivate the HTML-Editor on the edit area of the backend and can also eliminate the widgets in the widgets settings for various roles.

Adminimize Supports Custom Options

Besides these advantages, the Adminimize Plugin supports custom options for different posts because it is possible for you to add your own set of options for hiding the areas in the backend of your WordPress site. You can also use a fixed header or menu. Moreover, this plugin also allows you to use custom post types by hiding the needless areas of these posts for different post types and roles.

Import or Export Your Adminimize Plugin Settings

This plugin lets the users to import or export its settings and with the help of this feature, they can apply the same settings on their different WordPress sites. For exporting the settings, they have to simply click on the export button for downloading the .seq file consisting of the plugin.

If you want to import the settings of Adminimize plugin, you have to click on the Choose File button under the Import and then choose the .seq file that you are willing to import. Once you have selected the file, click on the Upload file and import button for importing the settings.

If you want to uninstall or deactivate the Adminimize plugin, you can use the Deinstall Option that allows you to disable all the plugin settings and if you want to ensure that all the Adminimize settings have been cleared, you can put check mark on the box next to the Delete Options to get it completely removed like this:

If you have already used simple plugins such as User Role Editor but found these plugins of no use to you, then you must install and activate the Adminimize plugin that helps you in taking control of admin area of your WordPress site by letting you decide which user groups you want to see and it also permit you to extend or limit what they can do at the backend of your website. For more help in installing this plug-in, have a look at this infographic.

If you have multi author websites or blogs, then this plugin is an ideal option for you to use, however, if you have some other important WordPress plugins that can help you in selecting the user groups at the back end of your website, then you can share with us in the comments section.

The post Way to Hide Unnecessary Items From WordPress Admin appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

With 2014 proceeding towards its end wrapping all its sweet and sour memories together, we must update ourselves with some of the hottest web design trends of WordPress to ensure success in the New Year 2015.

The summing up of 2014 has left behind many latest WordPress design trends that should be followed in next year including some new that have not been explored by the web designers yet. WordPress accounts for around 75 million websites on the internet that clearly exhibits the growing popularity and adoption of this technology among the website developers and owners. Being a WordPress developer, designer or a business owner, you might be eager to know what WordPress design trends are useful to you.

Keeping in mind, the popular WordPress design trends that will surely bring magical outcomes in the field of website designing, I am listing here top 7 trends that shouldn’t be overlooked in 2015.

1.Responsive Web Design – Magic Will Continue

The way internet is getting consumed via Smartphones is stirring at lightning speed with most of the internet users access the World Wide Web via Smartphones and Tablets. Therefore among all forecasted WordPress web design trends that will emit their spark in 2015, Responsive web design stood at first place.

In response to the flexible approach towards using internet, it makes sense that companies will continue on developing their websites more streamlined and user friendly for different platforms and that’s exactly what responsive web design does and will continue doing in next year as well.

Moreover, the introduction of new technologies such as smart watches, smart TVs etc. offer more room for the Responsive web design to move in the future because this is something that will be required always to view visually appealing websites on different screen sizes. Undoubtedly, this trend will persist to dominate the web design market owing to its flexibility and usefulness.

2. Focus on Background Images Will Surge

It is a known fact that words cannot do justice to pictures because a picture values hundreds of words alone. Therefore, this would be a new trend that would be a promising factor for web designers in 2015. Substantial background pictures would grow in importance and this is something that helps the WordPress sites in bringing life to their designs. The use of high definition (HD) and clear background pictures will become a necessity for WordPress website owners to make their site more eye-catching and lively for the visitors and this ongoing trend of using HD quality background images will definitely persist in 2015 as well.

WordPress has already adopted the full size high definition background images as a part its template design format and Cars WordPress theme is an example of a HD quality background image WordPress template

The background images will not only help in enhancing user engagement on WordPress sites, but they can easily act as a central point in the overall design of the website for generating a particular atmosphere on the web page by assisting the communication of your brand messages with your target audiences.

3. Welcome Flat – Goodbye to Pattern, Gradients, Shadows and Bubbles

Although, flat designs have established their presence for some time now, but they are regarded as Industry standard and hence, are one of the coolest web design trends that will continue to flourish in 2015 as well. The New Year 2015 will see many WordPress websites going flat and bidding farewell to other web design elements like patterns, gradients, shadows, and bubbles. It is the right time to embrace the simplicity and insightfulness of the flat designs that is somehow related with the most popular web design trend in demand and this is minimalism.

Willow is a multi-purpose one page WordPress flat design theme that embosses a perfect amalgamation of aesthetics with accord to appeal audiences:

No matter whether the target audiences will access the websites via desktops, laptops, Smartphones, or tablets, flat design are perfect for all devices by offering an intelligible page structure and clear layout. While Google has already called flat designs is material design due to their perfect combination of innovative technology with classic and good design principles, WordPress sites developed on flat design themes are definitely growing to catch impressive traffic and demand in the New Year.

4. Scrolling Will Take over Clicking

Scrolling will continue its dominance in near future due to its flexibility and functionality in the mobile phone environments. By offering a much pleasurable mobile experiences to the mobile phone users with a tendency to be more amicable and portable, scrolling will take over clicking that has been less supported by them in 2015. Due to the increasing popularity of scrolling as a demanding web design trend, there are various WordPress one page sites with scrolling feature integrated over the internet with more additions to come in the imminent year.

Live- A one page WordPress theme is a good example of a site with scrolling feature:

It will enhance the load time of the web pages, which is important for a website’s success. It means once again, the one page designed WordPress site with scrolling feature will get victory in the website wars challenging the standard multi-page layout tab in the New Year 2015 by offering more user-friendly and intuitive websites.

5. Ghosts Buttons- Something to Gain Focus in 2015

Apparently, Ghosts buttons are another web design trends that will become popular together with the Background images in 2015 for WordPress websites

With their smart, stylish, subtle and minimalistic design, these buttons will add the perfect touch of modernity and elegance to the website’s design. Besides other benefits that will help in increasing their popularity as the demanding web design trend for WordPress websites are:

• They will give clean and minimalistic look to the website.
• They will work with all types of design schemes.
• They are easy to create and design.

All these benefits will contribute equally in continuing the demand and recognition of Ghost buttons in 2015.

6. Typography Will Get More Focus

Gone are the days of Times New Roman and Ariel websites. The New Year will see the enhanced accessibility of reasonably priced and high quality web fonts due to the rising demand of expressive, creative and varied Typography trend within web design. The catalogue of accessible options in Typography is set to expand in 2015 and font sizes will also play an important role in the selection of Typography in the imminent year.

Due to the rise in small screen usage and clean design styles, the bigger Typography will see a boost in their usage in 2015 to avoid small screen users peeking at their mobile phones in frustration.

Mi is a single column WordPress theme that comes with TypeCase plugin to allow the web designers change the theme’s fonts as per their requirements:

7. HTML5 & CSS3 Will Get More Consideration In 2015

With the increasing recognition of WordPress in the website design domain, HTML5 & CSS3 are the two trends that would surely get better consideration in 2015, since they will not only help in improving the upload time of your WordPress website, but will also help in enhancing the compatibility of your site with different browsers of both mobile and desktop devices.

Moreover, these two web design trends will assure that your clients get proper accessibility of your website with their low speed internet connectivity as well.

At the end, all the above web design trends are based on the varied needs of the ever widening internet user market, but still these are considered pivotal in setting up new milestones in the world of website design in 2015. With internet speeding up in usage and popularity in upcoming years both via desktop and mobile devices, companies will definitely love to treat these predicted web design trends as pillar strengths for assured success of their websites in the New Year

The post WordPress Design Trends That Shouldn’t Be Overlooked In 2015 appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

One of the considerations that all WordPress plugin developers have to make is how to actually upload and optimize their plugin. If you are a veteran WordPress plugin developer, you already know how to hook up and promote your plugin at WordPress directory. But for those who don’t; this infographic will explain everything you need to know. This infographic also explains why it is important to develop plugin for WordPress by showing amazing statistics about WordPress. At the end of chart, various popular plugins are given with percentage of total searches, so that you can know which plugin development is more beneficial for you.

The post Steps to Upload WordPress Plugin and Promote it ( Infographic) appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

After creating a cool WordPress plugin, the next thing to do is to tell the world about it and how it is different from 38,500 other plugins present in the plugin directory. Developing a WordPress plugin can be easy and enjoyable but promoting and marketing of that plugin can be a time taking task, and it becomes annoying when you are not getting the results you want.

To get all your queries resolved on the subject- uploading and promotion of WordPress plugin, read through.

WordPress provides a free home for plugin at the WordPress Plugin Directory. Having your plugin there will help you to:

• Keep track of number of downloads
• Get your plugin rated against all the other WordPress plugins
• Give your plugin much of exposure in this centralized repository
• Enhance credibility and authority of your plugin

There are a few rules that you should know before uploading your plugin:

• Your plugin must be GPLv2 Compatible
• The plugin most not do anything illegal, and this will be determined by the review team.
• The plugin must not embed external links on the public site (like a “powered by” link) without explicitly asking the user’s permission.

Steps of Uploading:

1. First you have to Sign up
2. Within some defined time period, your plugin will be manually reviewed by experts and you may be emailed and asked to provide more information about your plugin.
3. After approval, you will have access to a Subversion Repository where you can store your plugin.
4. Once you store your plugin in that repository, it will automatically enter into the plugins browser.

How to promote your plugin?

There are some remarkable WordPress plugins in the official plugin directory with very few downloads, fewer votes, low ratings, and support threads. These plugins are very useful and yet they are surprisingly lesser known. The reason is quite obvious; the authors of these plugins were able to write excellent pieces of code poetry, but they were unable to read it aloud to their target audiences. In this section, I will share a few tips with you that you should follow to promote your plugins in an effective manner.

1. Create good readme.txt

The most important step in the promotion is the ‘readme file’ of your plugin. When people look for a plugin in directory, they do not see the code, they see the Readme file, which contains all useful description and details about the plugin. A poorly written ReadMe file clearly shows lack of attention from author’s side and it also discourages users from downloading the plugin. WordPress has its own readme.txt Standards which I recommend to copy and save in the same folder as your plugin. A typical plugin listing contains:

• Plugin Name
• Description
• Installation
• FAQ
• Screenshots
• Other Notes
• Changelog
• Stats
• Admin

2. Maintain documentation

Documentation is your readme file, Installation Instructions, FAQs, and Troubleshooting instructions, which need to be maintained regularly. When people use your plugin, they might find bugs, or ask you questions regarding your plugin, therefore, you should keep proper documentation about your plugin that can give answers to users’ questions. The documentation should comprise quick fixes, examples, and solutions that will also improve the overall user experience.

3. Create a plugin website

Creating your plugin website is probably the best way to popularize it. If you have a blog site, you can create a blog entry, or make a small two-three page website. You can also make a WordPress Plugins section on your website, where users can easily download your plugins as well as learn more about it and ask you questions regarding the same. This shows users that you care about your plugins and it also gives you a chance to showcase these plugins in your portfolio.

4. Maintain your plugin

Users who download your plugin would like to see that you fix bugs, add new features, and keep up with new releases of WordPress. In some cases, it is not possible to release an update because there are no bugs reported or found and it is working just fine, In that case, you need to let people know that your plugin is still actively maintained by you.

5. Provide support for plugin

It is quite possible that after using your plugin, users expect you to provide answers to their questions and provide help from time to time. One of the best places to provide support for your plugin is WordPress forums, where users are most likely to ask questions about plugins. In addition to this, you can also provide answers to the questions on your own plugin website, Twitter and Facebook pages, and webmaster forums. You can also create a Google Alert for your plugin and get instantly notified if any user writes something about your plugin.

6. Promotion with social sharing

Social media sharing or marketing is the easiest and fast way for promoting your plugin. You should follow the below mentioned steps:

• Tweet it- You can tweet your plugin and don’t forget to add a hashtag or two like #wordpress and #plugins to catch some internal traffic from Twitter. You can also share your plugin on Facebook & Google+.
• StumbleUpon- Submit your plugin on stumbleupon and pick a few interests and do some stumbling, as stumbleupon’s algorithm is not based on understanding content like Google. It is based on understanding people. In other words, as StumbleUpon gets to know you, it will suggest you pages that people like you have liked. So just reverse this process for targeted traffic.
• Design Float- It is a social bookmarking site for the design community that can submit your plugin to the promos section.

7.Email plugin to your subscribers

If you have an email list of subscribes, send out a quick email letting them know about your latest plugin. Your email should contain what your plugin does and where they can download it. In addition to this, you can add a link to your plugin in your email signature. It is a passive way of spreading word about your plugin.

8.Content-based Promotion

These methods include writing content and including a link to your plugin. The effective content marketing method takes a bit more effort, but will definitely help you to get more links and traffic to your plugin. You can do following things:

• Guest Blogging- You can write a post for another blog in your niche and include a link to your plugin. This helps your plugin’s rank and you will likely get some downloads from interested readers. Furthermore, you can do a list post like Top 7 Navigation Plugins and include your plugin in it.
• Submit a Press Release- Writing and submitting a press release is a very easy thing to do. You can cover the story behind your plugin, some stats about the industry, and quote yourself a few times talking about the plugin. Your PR should be 300-750 words long.
• Video Submission- You can create a tutorial video on plugin usage and include it in your plugin description. This video not only leads to more conversions and reduces support requests, but it also drives traffic.

9. Promotion through Competitive Analysis

In order to do effective promotion, you can do some competitive research and find out where and how other people just like you are promoting their plugins. You can use tools like Open Site Explorer, SEO Spyglass, or Majestic SEO to find out where plugins like yours are getting links from. In addition to this, you can perform following tasks to earn back links:

• You can do Google search to see if any plugin is ranking for targeted keywords. After that you can find their back links and try to copy them.
• You can go to plugins.svn.wordpress.org and search for similarly named plugins. Search their public page and find their back links.
• You can also check out the back link profiles for some of the most popular WordPress plugins, which should serve as good source of inspiration for further link building.

These tips will definitely help in effective promotion of your plugin. You should keep in mind that your plugin is able to expand functionality of WordPress making it more prompt and user friendly, then only people will download it. In order to enhance credibility about your plugin, I recommend you to hire experienced WordPress plugin developers for few plugins. In this way, you will be able to give a professional touch to your plugins and it will also create buzz about your plugin in the market that result more download.

The post Optimize Your Own WordPress Plugin Using These Simple Tips appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

E-commerce business is spreading its wings with great pace, as more and more people are beginning to rely on the Internet to buy products. Selecting suitable e-commerce platform is important for a successful business, and platforms which can fulfill the following parameters are highly acknowledged:

• Plenty of effective e-commerce themes and plugins
• Easy to use
• Cost-effective
• Easy to install and upgrade
• SEO friendly
• Secure

Though there are multiple options which satisfy above needs, however my pick is WordPress. Most people think that WordPress is just for blogging, but it is much more than that. It can provide a very flexible platform on which your e-commerce website easily grows. There are various advantages of WordPress for developing business website and e-commerce website. Some points that will fuel your inclination toward this platform are mentioned below:

1. WordPress has plethora of e-commerce plugins

Due to its flexibility lot of plugins are available to extend WordPress functionality from a normal blogging platform to use it as a base for large portal, social networking site or even an e-commerce website. There are many plugins available in internet world which can help you in launching a WordPress ecommerce website.

Features of WordPress e-commerce plugins:

• Easy to install
• Instant support community
• All the popular payment gateways supported
• Search engine friendly
• Supports multiple currencies
• Multi-shipping options
• SSL security integration

Famous WordPress e-commerce plugins:

Woocommerce

Woocommerce is one of the popular plugins that comes from the developers of the famous Woothemes. This plugin promises to provide elegance to your website as well as powerful e-commerce facilities. Further, this highly customizable plugin comes with multiple payment options including Cheque, Paypal, Cash on delivery and many more options.

WP e-commerce

If you are searching for an e-commerce plugin which has a high usability factor and great looks, then WP e-commerce is perfect option for you. The WP e-commerce shopping cart is widely used for selling products and services online. In addition to this, it can be used to collect fees online if you choose to run a service that requires yearly or monthly fees to be paid.

Cart66 Pro

This e-commerce plugin enables you to sell physical as well as digital products from your site. This plugin is good choice for those who are willing to make their webpage a one stop shop, as you can manage orders, sell products, place products anywhere on your website or sell internationally. Payments can be received by PayPal Website Payments Standard, Manual Checkout or PayPal Express Checkout.

EShop

One of the famous WordPress shopping plugins, Eshop is helpful in creating product spots because of its compatibility with custom post types. You can download as well as upload product by using this plugin. Apart from generating automated emails, E-shop has basic control of stock and multi-site compatibility. Checkout is done by PayPal, Authorize.net, Payson, Webtopay, eProcessingNetwork, iDEAL and Cash/Cheque.

2. WordPress has plenty of e-commerce themes

There are thousands of both free and paid e-commerce themes that install easily into WordPress and give your e-commerce website an instant design makeover. Many themes of this platform are also designed to be responsive that means they will adapt to any device from desktop to tablet to mobile, therefore, it is a quick way to expand your online audience and give all website visitors a good experience.

All the WordPress themes are editable that allows you to modify these as per your specific requirement. If you want your website to align with, and add to, your brand value, than you need a custom WordPress theme created for you. A custom theme is about aligning the ‘look and feel’ of your website with exactly what you want. For designing your own theme, I recommend to hire experienced WordPress theme designer, who will give your website new look as per your requirement.

If you want to use existing WordPress e-commerce themes, then I have mentioned some famous themes:

Store WordPress Theme

If you are looking a theme for any size of online store, big or small, then store is the best option for you. It is an elegant and hugely customizable WooCommerce powered ecommerce WordPress theme. This theme is perfect for any brand and is suitable for selling all types of products. Some features of this theme include

• 12 unique page templates (team, partners, testimonials and services etc.)
• A powerful slider
• Multiple layout options
• Portfolio templates
• Integrated blog

Elite WordPress Theme

Elite is a visually striking, unique and feature packed WooCommerce store WordPress theme. This theme would be perfect for clothes and fashion stores, luxury products, or boutique online shop that wants to present their products in a professional, bold and memorable manner. Some of the features of this theme include:

• A fully customizable and widgetzied homepage
• Over 100 Google font options
• Attention widget with custom icons
• Light-box pop-up galleries
• Automatic updates

Clean Sale WordPress Theme

It is an elegant and professional ecommerce WordPress theme, which is ideal for big stores that have a lot of products. It has a very clean, minimalist design that is ideal for showcasing and selling any type of merchandise. Due to its responsive design, visitors can search, view and buy products no matter if they using a desktop mobile, tablet or desktop computer. Some of the other features of this theme comprises:

• A multiple block homepage slider
• Product image slider for showing multiple product images
• Customizable typography
• Visual customizer to easily make visual change

Gather Responsive Ecommerce WordPress Theme

Gather is an elegant minimalist e-commerce WordPress theme with a responsive design and it allows you to showcase your work, sell your products and maintain a blog all together in style. Ecommerce functionality in this theme is powered by WooCommerce ecommerce plugin so you can get a featured packed and powerful online store. Some features of this theme include:

• A touch swipe slider
• Custom post type for portfolio management
• A filterable portfolio template
• Google fonts
• A custom options panel to set your own colors, backgrounds, logo etc.

3. Other features that make WordPress an ideal choice for e-commerce website:

It is cost-effective
An open source platform, WordPress is available for Free that means this platform can be used for e-commerce projects without incurring any cost. Not only this, its creators are continuously improving the system and you can download all the updates from the internet for free, too.

It is flexible
The way WordPress platform is designed makes it quite flexible and it can easily be customized and edited (without needing specific domain expertise) to be used as a shopping website.

It is easy to install and upgrade
WordPress e-commerce platform is well known for its “Famous Five Minutes Installation”. Installing WordPress is quite easy and can be done in following three steps:

• Create a database
• Specify parameters in wp-config.php
• Upload the actual WordPress source code to your web root

It has Well Defined Sections
WP e-commerce sections are well organized and their functions are simple and well explained. For example, the incorporation of the “Groups” tab allows the addition of unlimited categories as well as their sub-categories. That means, instead of using separate pages for different functions, like in Zencart and Magento, WP e-commerce uses manageable tabs, which allows easier navigation and efficient access to the functions.

It has Cross Promotion and Marketing Tools
You will be able to increase your profits of your e-commerce business using the Marketing tools and Cross Promotion that are part of the WordPress E-Commerce System.

The post Why Use WordPress As An E-Commerce Platform? appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

When you are enthusiastic to implement a great start-up idea online, the first thing that comes up in your mind is: how to build an attractive and attention-worthy website that can help you market and sell your products & services to the gigantic internet audience almost instantly. Most often, you get frustrated while looking at so many options that are available out there in the market with its own set of pros and cons. From my vast experience of completing 500+ international projects at TIS India with a highly determined team of website developers and designers, I have come to the conclusion that the choice of a right platform is indispensable for the success of every online business today. However, it is absolutely challenging yet important to choose a platform which is powerful enough to provide you with extreme versatility and high-end customizability – all in one place.

So, why not consider WordPress – the one and only award winning Open Source Content Management System which is ruling the web today with a total 20% of world’s websites thriving successfully on its robust platform. Undeniably, the high end flexibility and the ease in the operability of WordPress has made it stand out from the crowd of various other Open Source frameworks that are populating the web cloud. With WordPress, it is possible to jumpstart your project with a little budget without compromising even a bit on the functionalities, aesthetics and most importantly, the usability. So, let’s gear up our tech minds with the latest features and functionalities of WordPress to get the most out of this renowned platform this fiscal year !!

A Quick Insight into Facts and Figures– Believe what you see !!

Without any doubt, WordPress wears the crown of being the most popular CMS – in the huge kingdom of open source platforms. But for those who are still wondering the capabilities of this giant platform, I have compiled a list of some interesting statistics which will easily convince you to go with WordPress without any fear.

• Amongst 36% of the online businesses that are running on various content management systems across the globe, WordPress ranks no. 1 with a whopping no. of 54%(~ 75 million)websites which are globally powered by this platform. This accounts for nearly one-sixth of all websites of the world that are successfully deployed on WordPress alone.
• The latest stable version of WordPress i.e. version 3.8 has been downloaded 20 million times as of Feb 19, 2014.
• The Websites and Blogs of some of the world famous brands and Fortune 500 companies – Mozilla, Yahoo, CNN, Samsung, EBay, Flickr, Techcrunch , Quartz, Forbes, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Harvard Law School, Sony Music, Best Buy, The Wall Street Journal, Metro UK, Dallas Mavericks, Sweden’s Official Site and The New York Times are all running on WordPress.
• According to the live WordPress stats, more than 409 million people view nearly 13.1 billion pages on WordPress every month and the terms related to WordPress are queried 30 lakh times per month on Google alone.

Now let’s move on to the rest of the article to know what WordPress has in box for you and how it’s features can match up to your specific business requirements.

A 4-in-one platform for Lean Startups : Easy to install, Quick to Build, Simple to Convert and Facile to customize

Usually, small businesses don’t have big investors and a huge capital to start from. Hence, they can’t spend on sophisticated infrastructure and vast human resource when they step into the digital market. In such a scenario, there is a dire need of a promising platform that can offer multiple functionalities along with prolonged benefits that can help them realize their dreams in minimal possible time and within a limited budget.

So, if you’re a novice entrepreneur who is eager to implement his start-up idea with a small capital, WordPress is a boon for you!! If you don’t believe me, let me explain how WordPress makes it possible!!

1) It is extremely easy to install WordPress. Almost every hosting solution vendor in the market provides an automatic ‘click and install’ interface for WordPress. This not only reduces the overhead of manual installation of files via FTP but it saves both your time and money.

2) Designing & Development of a WordPress website is much quicker and affordable than any other CMS platform(Joomla, Drupal etc), dedicated frameworks or programming languages. The reason being, WordPress library is the world’s largest repository of both free & commercial themes and plugins which can be easily integrated into a website.

However, you may not develop a love-at-first-sight kinda relationship with the free themes of WordPress as most of them are not aesthetically appealing. Plus, none of the theme (even the paid ones) can completely fit to the specific business requirements of your brand and with so many WordPress websites on the web, your chosen design may clash with some other website leading to front-end duplicacy. If you have to emerge uniquely best amongst your customers, just choosing a free theme and framing your website deliberately into it can cost you sales & leads. So here, I strongly recommend you to hire a good team of WordPress developers and designers who are experts in WordPress customization.

3) The best part about WordPress is its inherent flexibility that lets you customize each and everything the way you want and that too on your own. With WordPress, the Site management becomes much easier and quicker with the famous user-friendly editor: WYSIWYG(What you see is what you get) which is built-in into it. This editor has a drag and drop functionality to let you create new web pages, posts or articles easily and quickly just like you do with any other editor you’re familiar with.

Below I have included a screenshot of this built-in editor right from our own WordPress dashboard to make you understand better. You might notice two tabs in this diagram – Visual and Html. In “visual” tab, you can write content, place images and do everything just like you do in MS word and whoa, when you click the HTML tab, you will see that WP automatically codes the HTML for you!! Further, if you don’t want to publish your new blog or webpage live on your website, you can save it as a draft and use it later.

No other platform, Joomla or Drupal is blessed with this kind of editor till now and yes, they’re working on this aspect in an endeavour to outpace WordPress. But unfortunately, none of the platforms have succeeded in this attempt as of now.

4.) WordPress is the only economical solution if you compare the project development costs with any other platform. In terms of hiring costs and development time, WordPress is the cheapest and best solution to consider. Whilst it is important to get the front end customized from expert WordPress developers, you will save on the hefty site management costs if you choose WordPress.

The Biggest Warehouse of Free Goodies – Beautiful themes , Ready made modules and Super functional plug-ins at your fingertips

WordPress users are growing at the speed of light and so are its themes and plugins. With more than 2500 themes to download and over 30,000+ plugins to integrate, WordPress library is the largest amongst all other open source CMS platforms.

WordPress lets you enjoy your project to its core without the hassle of coding anything on your own and that too for free. It promises much more than the support and that’s the Flexibility, Scalability & Stability. Not only this, it lets you choose from a wide range of beautiful themes and functional modules so that you can mould and customize everything according to your desire.

Some of the featured plugins that WordPress boasts of include : Buddypress – a social networking plugin that lets you create your own community of friends or customers ; WP Super Cache – an extremely fast caching engine that produces static html files ; Theme-check – an exclusive theme development tool that also lets you test your theme on all versions and BBPress – an exclusive forum software.

As far as WordPress themes are concerned, I would recommend you to go through one of my previous posts – Top 10 wordpress web design trends in 2014 that talks about the hottest trends that are ruling the web right now along with the suggested best responsive themes that can give an aesthetically appealing brand new look to your web designs.

Built in SEO capabilities – A weapon to out reach to more and more customers right from the start

SEO- friendliness is something that’s built-in into WordPress. It’s architectured that way – Practice Modern SEO Effortlessly!! WordPress comes with some exclusive SEO optimization tools that will let you attract website traffic right from the day one. I am listing some very important features below to make you aware about the SEO support that WordPress offers.

• WordPress gives you the ability to create Permalinks –user friendly URLs that enhance your site’s visibility to a great extent. With permalink feature, you can control the type of URL’s or links and convert big meaningless names to meaningful ones that search engines can easily understand. For e.g usually when you create a webpage dynamically through frameworks, the URL that is created looks like – http://www. abc.com/index.php?p=13. But with permalinks, they will be converted to meaningful URLs like http://www.abc.com/my-rose-garden.php etc.
• With WordPress, you can easily include Keywords, meta tags, descriptions etc with every webpage via Custom Fields Option
• Image optimization via adding alt texts and title tags is easy with WordPress. Plus, you can easily add captions to your images. All this can be done using its robust admin panel with utmost ease.
• WordPress gives you the ability to categorize everything on your site. This lets you arrange all your important stuff (articles, posts etc) automatically just like aggregating everything into small folders. This helps search engines to index everything fast. Here if you play intelligent, you can include the most-searchable keywords as names of the categories to boost traffic on your site.
• WordPress allows you to create tags just like you create labels at the end of your article. This lets you use keyword phrases to describe your post better and faster. Plus, it will assist both search engines and web surfers in finding your site.
• WordPress makes cross linking easier by allowing you to create inbound links efficiently. Hence it’s like an another WordPress tool that facilitates search engine optimization.
• There are numerous 3rd party SEO plugins and hacks which can be easily downloaded from the official WordPress plug-in directory. The integration of these plugins into your website can serve all your advanced SEO purposes efficiently.

To summarise, no CMS platform other than WordPress can act as an SEO-saint to meet all your search engine optimization requirements as well. WordPress automatically generates search engine friendly URL’s for you. If you add a couple of extensions to it, like the Google XML sitemap, All-in-One SEO pack and Yoast, your site has good chances to rank high in search engines since you’re optimizing everything right from the start. Not just this, search engines also tend to love WordPress. The reason being, WordPress comes bundled with a self ping feature and everytime when you update your WordPress site or blog, it will notify all major search engines to refresh its database and fetch the cached copy of your new stuff. Generally, if you don’t use WordPress, crawlers take at least 10-15 days time to index your new content when you make any changes on your website and thus it hurts your revenue generation goals. So, if you are looking for a built-in SEO solution with the CMS you wish to choose, you must go with WordPress!!

Launch a solid content marketing strategy – An integrated Blog cum Website

Executing a result oriented Digital Marketing campaign is impossible without WordPress ever since Content Marketing has taken first-seat in the business strategy of modern era. All the traditional ways of marketing have been flushed by smart entrepreneurs and now all focus is on creating an editorial calendar that can pull in quality traffic and generate new leads. For this, it is necessary to create a separate blog wherein you can frequently post new articles and manage the news related to your business. WordPress is the only robust solution that offers you both the web development and blogging features. Plus, it also lets you integrate social media widgets in your posts and share everything via “Like”, “Share” and “Pin” buttons so that you can build a good repo with your target audience as well as existing customers.

Perfect Platform to cast a spellbound on the Mobile Audience

Mobile Technology is the new storm that has swiped off everybody with its touch screen revolution. I am pretty sure that every fifth Internet user right now is surfing the web via mobile phone or tablet. Thus, it is certainly foolish if you ignore the mobile friendliness when you are choosing a platform for your business. Majority of the sites and blogs already have a mobile version that can run smoothly regardless of device and browser being used. And, WordPress again wins here with its Mobile specific themes and plugins that transform your existing site into a complete mobile site in a jiffy!! Some of the best themes, plugins and toolkits that are available for WordPress users include – WPTap, WPTouch, WordPress Mobile Pack, MobilePress etc.

You can even create a custom mobile friendly WordPress admin panel for yourself to manage comments, create new posts or change anything on your site with utmost comfortability even when your laptop or PC is not around. This can be done with the exclusive WordPress apps – WordPress for iPhone, WordPress for Blackberry, WordPress for Android and WPhone all absolutely free and easy to use.

Exclusive Support Guaranteed with huge WordPress community

Whilst community of WordPress is already the largest amongst all other open source CMS platforms like Joomla, Drupal etc; it is constantly growing by leaps and bounds. With all the tech geeks & application programming nerds at one place, one cannot doubt the support that is offered to the users of this giant platform. So, you need not worry if you get stuck implementing your star idea at midnight. Just relax and join the community. From detailed documentation to comprehensive tutorials, video lessons and screencasts etc, you can easily develop anything that you want. Currently the WordPress community publishes 5 lakh new posts everyday and there are more than 8 lakh videos on YouTube featuring WordPress tutorials. In fact, there are over 90,000 WordPress developers listed on Freelancer.com alone for those who would like to outsource their projects to web development experts.

With such a large number of fascinating features to its credit, it is certainly impossible to ignore the capabilities of WordPress and compromise the business goals by adopting any platform other than this. It is always wise to foresee the growth with a growing platform and envision a small enterprise reaching new heights of success. If you would like to give us a chance to join hands with you in building a successful enterprise, have a word with our team of experienced web designers and developers or read all our latest web development blogs that talk about the newest web-building trends. Good luck !!

The post Why WordPress is An Ideal Platform for Startups !! appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.