If you’ve been a victim of malware, you know how frustrating it is to remove. Unless you’re an expert, you may lose valuable time and money trying to figure out how to fix the damage done. This blog will explain what malware is, and how to prevent it from happening.

What is Malware?

Malware stands for malicious hardware. As you can probably figure out, is not something you want on your WordPress website. “The most common types of malware are viruses, trojans, worms, spyware and zombies,” states Website Defender.

This website explains different types of malware, stating that the most common type of malware comes in the shape of a virus. Viruses are very tricky to detect because they can live on your site for different periods of time without you knowing about them. Your WordPress site may act strange all of a sudden but it doesn’t always mean it has just been infected. The virus could have been implemented days, weeks, months, or even years ago before manifesting itself. The trick is, it acts like your own site for some time, which helps the site’s owner not realize that an infection has occurred.

A worm is a more extreme case of a virus. Viruses spread on one computer, while worms have the capability to travel between computers, thus making them much more aggressive when spreading.

A trojan is an attack that is masked as something else, like a photo or a video. For example, if you get an e-mail from an unknown address asking you to open a photo, the photo can actually contain malware in the form of a trojan. The trojan will then leave a virus on your computer.

Spyware is malware that people use to get information from people’s computers. First, the spyware gathers info. Then the info is sent back to the person who infected the computer.

Zombies are probably the most unpleasant form of malware for those that witness its effects. Once a zombie has been implemented on a computer, the controller can send commands that your computer will follow. Therefore, it can greatly affect your WordPress site, making it do whatever the controller wants. If you’ve ever operated your computer, only to be shocked to see it having a mind of its own, it most likely has been infected with a zombie.

Good Hosting Companies to Prevent Malware

From our experience, we have found that most types of malware affect WordPress sites through hosting companies. Hosting companies sell you space on the Internet where your WordPress site will exist. The best malware removal tip is to prevent malware from getting on your site. Two good hosting companies we can recommend are WP Engine and Siteground.

WP Engine

Although this hosting is very tech-heavy, it is also great for novices as they have very helpful customer service. Every single member of their staff is a hosting expert, and they will take the time to answer all your questions about what is malware and also steps to prevent malware. They offer time machine based backups for easy rollback or restores, and if your site does ever get hacked, they will take full responsibility and restore it at no cost. One great feature is that they offer a clone button of your live site that copies your WordPress site to staging environment. This is great for development as it create a “sandbox” site for development and testing without effecting your current, live site. The first level of hosting is $29/mo per site risk-free for 60 days.

NOTE: WP Engine doesn’t offer an email solution so this would have to be setup independently. Rackspace has dedicated email ($2/mo per user) or Google Apps for Business ($50/year per user).

SiteGround

For more affordable hosting, we like SiteGround, which offers competitive rates for hosting and is WordPress friendly. SiteGround claims that they create custom hosting for each WordPress site, making it faster and better. They often run promotions so you can check the site for their latest offers. Their first package starts at $3.95/mo for 1-3 years and then switches to $9.95/mo. For added security, we recommend adding CloudFlare and security plugins such as Login Lockdown, Sucuri’s one click hardening, BulletProof Security, Sitelock, or Wordfence. The best thing about CloudFlare is its capability of expediting and safeguarding practically anything online. This includes the great mass of websites, APIs, and other properties connected to the Internet. SiteGround has a built-in one-click integration with cPanel and a lower rate on the Plus plan. It can also help speed up the site.

Plugins to Keep Your Site Secure

Login Lockdown is a security plugin that has the capability of limiting the number of login attempts from a given IP range within a certain time period. Every failed attempt is recorded then the login function is disabled. It currently defaults to an hour lock out of an IP block after 3 failed attempts within 5 minutes.

Sucuri is a globally recognized authority in all matters related to website security, with specialization in WordPress Security. The Sucuri Security WordPress Security plugin is free to all WordPress users.

Bulletproof Security protects against known and unknown attacks like brute force login attack. It also features database backup and protection, and firewall security and protection.

Sitelock protects more than six million websites all over the world.  It has all the technology to do regular scanning, auto-removal of malware, and web app firewall to ensure the safety of sites.

Wordfence is a security plugin that provides the best protection suited to a particular website. This is also powered by the constantly updated Threat Defense Feed, which allows WordFence Firewall to stop websites from getting hacked. Wordfence Scan leverages the same proprietary feed, alerting website users quickly in the event the site is compromised.

The team at Behla Design is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of the top web design and development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copywriting professionals. Our founder, Andrew Behla, has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years.

For more information about making your site mobile friendly, contact Behla Design.

A developer recently asked us about the benefits of creating a WordPress child theme for websites. This was such a great question, after all, many people do not know or would not think of how to create two different versions of their site. However, creating a parent and a child theme is actually very important for a particular website.

While many people who have a WordPress blog or site will choose to use the default themes that WordPress offers, this may not be always the best option. Even some of the best WordPress themes are already set up, so it can be minimal in terms of functionality and features, and customization is limited. Therefore, we usually say that the best WordPress themes are custom, with the help of frameworks such as WooThemes. However, you should decide what works best for you depending on your skill level and needs.

What is a WordPress Theme Framework?

A parent theme, also known as a WordPress theme framework is “the term WordPress theme framework often refer to a code library that is used to facilitate development of a theme,” according to WP Beginner. Various theme frameworks exist, some are paid, others are free. Some allow you to just implement design if you’re a beginner and don’t really know how to set up a WordPress blog or site, and others offer the bare minimum and allow you to code the site to your specifications.

Among the recent best choice when it comes to building WordPress websites is BeaverBuilder.  It became popular for a number of reasons. Images and texts can be positioned with precision, and column-based layouts can be built in a matter of minutes. It also comes with a number of gorgeous page templates to choose from.

There are many advantages to using a theme, for example, it speeds up development time because you don’t need to build your website or WordPress blog from scratch. Also, some of the best WordPress themes are popular, so if you have any questions, there are forums where you can get help from others.

What is a WordPress Child Theme?

A WordPress child theme is a theme that you create for your WordPress blog or site. The most important thing to know is that a child theme is a secondary theme. The first and main theme that you create is called a parent theme. This is the framework where you control all the functions.

“A WordPress child theme is a theme that inherits the functionality of another theme, called the parent theme,” states WordPress. “Child theme allows you to modify, or add to the functionality of that parent theme. A child theme is the safest and easiest way to modify an existing theme, whether you want to make a few tiny changes or extensive changes. Instead of modifying the theme files directly, you can create a child theme and override within.”

WordPress theme

What are the Benefits of Creating a WordPress Child Theme?

1. Development – Creating a child theme will speed up the time it takes to develop your WordPress blog or site. It’s also pretty easy to learn as many of the best WordPress themes allow even beginners to easily set up a theme.

2. Not Losing Changes – Many times, when you update a WordPress theme, any changes or customization you have made to your website will be lost. Creating a WordPress child theme prevents that from happening. You can customize the child theme, and then update the parent theme. All the updates and new features will automatically be applied to the child theme, but none of the customization will be affected.

3. Allows for Mistakes – “When you are creating a complete theme, you need to think about all the possible scenarios and code for them,” says WP Beginner. “However, when you are working on a child theme and you forgot to code for something, then there is always the parent theme’s functionality available as the fallback option.”

How to Create a WordPress Child Theme

WordPress.org gives a great summary of how to create a child theme:

• Create a directory in your themes directory to hold the child theme. The theme directory is wp-content/themes. You should name the directory without any space as part of the name, and it is common practice to use the name of the parent theme folder with “-child” appended to it. For example, if you are making a child of the twentythirteen theme, your folder name would be twentythirteen-child.

• In the child theme directory, create a file called style.css. This is the only file required to make a child theme. The style sheet must start with the following lines:

/*
 Theme Name:     Twenty Thirteen Child
 Theme URI:      http://example.com/twenty-thirteen-child/
 Description:    Twenty Thirteen Child Theme
 Author:         John Doe
 Author URI:     http://example.com
 Template:       twentythirteen
 Version:        1.0.0
*/

@import url("../twentythirteen/style.css");

/* =Theme customization starts here
-------------------------------------------------------------- */

You can change each of these lines to suit your theme. The only required lines are the Theme Name, and the Template. The Template is the directory name of the parent theme. In this case, the parent theme is the TwentyThirteen theme, so the Template is twentythirteen, which is the name of the directory where the TwentyThirteen theme resides. If you want to make a child of a theme with the directory name example-theme-name, then you would use Template: example-theme-name.

• The child theme’s stylesheet is included after the parent theme’s and styles will therefore override those in the parent theme’s stylesheet.
• Activate the child theme. Log in to your site’s dashboard, and go to Administration Panels > Appearance > Themes. You will see your child theme listed there. Click Activate.

In conclusion, remember that creating a WordPress child theme can have many great benefits to your WordPress blog or site. However, if you don’t make too many changes to your original site, you may not need one. So do your research and figure out the best way to go for your website.

The team at Behla Design is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of the top web design and development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copy writing professionals. Our founder, Andrew Behla, has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years.

For more information about making your site mobile friendly, contact Behla Design.

We are always on the hunt for great plugins, and we love to share our findings in order to save others time with research. Last month, we needed to find affiliate plugins for a client we were working with, and after a lengthy search of reading reviews, and trying the plugins out, here are our top three choices. But first, let’s define what an affiliate plugin is.

What is an Affiliate Program?

Have you ever noticed when visiting a website that they have Amazon ads at the bottom? Those are called affiliates. An affiliate program allows other websites to post a link to your site, and then the other sites pay you commission for each time someone clicks on their site, or buys one of their products. In the example above, if you choose to run Amazon ads on your website, Amazon will pay you commission if a person coming from your site buys something on Amazon.

Affiliate programs can work for virtually anything. If you have a website for dentist reviews, dentists can pay you for referring them on your website. If you have a blog about home improvement, you can link contractor websites on your own site, and they will have to pay you every time someone clicks on their ad.

Benefits of an Affiliate Program

There are various benefits to joining an affiliate program. Tipsandtricks-hq.com lists the following:

Increased sales
Drive traffic to your site
Generate qualified leads
Extend the reach of your brand
Better search engine rankings
The ultimate viral marketing strategy

Three Top WordPress Affiliate Plugins

WordPress Affiliate Platform Plugin

If you have read our other blogs, you know that we are a huge proponent of using WordPress. Their affiliate platform plugin is an easy way to start an affiliate program. You can use the plugin to recruit affiliates, pay them commission, and then manage and track the progress. The plugin is pretty easy to use; you basically create banners and links which are posted on others’ websites, and then you can see how each website is doing, and how much traffic each site is bringing to you. The program will even figure out and pay commission for you.

These are the features that are listed on their site:

• Launch your affiliate campaign in a short time.
• Monitor clicks and conversions of visitors sent by your affiliates.
• Maintain your brand with your own product Ad Banners and Links.
• Drive more traffic to your landing/sales page from your Affiliate’s site.
• Significantly BOOST revenue with more sales.

Magic Affiliate

This is a great plugin that is integrated with WooCommerce. It claims to make your website a fully-automated membership site for affiliates. The developers claim that it’s very easy to use; the only thing you’d need to do is activate the plugin through WordPress and be using the plugin in minutes. It’s not hard for novices to figure out, as there are no codes involved. Probably their best sales push is that you can try them out for free. They offer a 30-day money back guarantee if you are not satisfied.

It’s easy to integrate with WooCommerce, WP e-commerce, as well as AWeber, GetResponse, Constant Contact, iContact and MailChimp, and is compatible with Magic Members WordPress Membership Plugin.

While the affiliate above allows you to make manual payments, Magic affiliate lets you make PayPal Mass payments automatically, which is a huge time saver.

WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates – WordPress Plugin

Everyone knows that Amazon is the biggest deal in online retail. If you have a working site, you may want to consider partnering up with Amazon to earn commission from them. This plugin allows you to do so safely and easily. You can actually create your own store on your e-commerce site, and sell products directly from Amazon. You can earn up to 10% commission from Amazon’s million affiliate program items. And during special promotions, you can even earn up to 25% in commissions.

Here are some other great features, as listed on their support page:

• Choose from any Amazon Location – Worldwide, Amazon Germany, Amazon United Kingdom, Amazon Canada, Amazon France, Amazon Japan, Amazon India, Amazon Italy, Amazon China, Amazon Spain.
• 90 days cookies feature – With this feature, when a user is redirected to amazon, the product is automatically added to cart and kept there for 90 days (this boosts your conversions also!).
• On Site Cart feature! This option will allow your customers to add multiple Amazon Products into Cart and checkout trough Amazon’s system with all at once!
• Prices setup – Select if you want to import prices only from Seller Amazon, or from other sellers as well (get lowest price)
• Products Variations – Get product variations. Be careful about Yes All variations as one product can have a lot of variation. With this, execution time is dramatically increased!
• Great SEO content for your products, our WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates – WordPress Plugin takes all data available for all Amazon products: Title, Prices (regular prices, sales prices and all prices variations), all products attributes, product reviews and full products descriptions.

Contact Behla Design

Our team at Behla Design, Graphic Design & Web Development, is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of top web design, web development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copywriting professionals and has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years. Contact us today to find out how we can help your next project.

Do you have unique items to sell, found a great wholesale deal on terrific products, or simply wish to make an extra income? Have you considered opening up an e-commerce store? Nowadays, it’s easier than ever to make money online. We help clients every day by explaining how to start an online business. By reading this blog, you can partake in some of our knowledge and how we’ve helped our clients achieve the success they desire.

Benefits of an Online Business

There are so many great benefits to starting an online business. The first advantage is saving money. A physical store entails many processes like signing a multi-year lease, paying rent and utilities, and hiring salespeople, etc. On top of that, you need to invest money into furniture and decor for the store or business and other expenses. With an online business, you don’t need any of that. You can work from anywhere while you start out, even in your own garage.

The second benefit to starting an online business is that you get to work from home. This means you get to spend more time with your family members and have time to pick up your kids from school, if you prefer. You can even make money online while in your pajamas! Furthermore, you don’t have to spend money on gas driving to and from work, lunch at work, and so on.

But perhaps the biggest benefit to starting an online business is that your items will be available to people all over the world. With a physical location, only people in that neighborhood or city will come to shop or use your services. With an online store, there are no boundaries to where your clients can live.

How to Start an Online Business with WordPress

So you want to work from home and make money online? Follow these five steps that will teach you how to start an online business.

WordPress theme

1. Create a Website – We are huge fans of WordPress. This free web software allows anyone, whether novice or expert, to create a site for their needs. All you need to do is first find a host that is compatible with WordPress. That is not hard to do, as there are thousands of options to choose from. Then, you can download and sign up for a WordPress account. This will take no more than five minutes.

WordPress has numerous support forums online and countless YouTube videos that explain different features to help you customize your online business website. Thousands of plugins are also compatible with WordPress, some free and some paid, and these are very easy to upload and edit. Read some of our other posts to find out what other steps you can take to customize and improve your site with content writing, search options, shipping options, etc.

2. Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – This is probably the most important thing you can do apart from building a great, easy-to-use website, and offering great products or services, according to Entrepreneur. SEO means doing research to optimize your website to register and come up in Google searches. Say you sell clothes online. How are you going to compete with thousands of other e-commerce stores that sell clothes? You will do so by researching which keywords or terms potential clients are searching for.

Keyword planner from Google Adwords is a great, free tool at your disposal. You need to enter a term that you think your buyers would search for, such as True Religion jeans, and you will see how many monthly searches that term has, and what the competition for that term is. Competition just means how many other sites are optimizing for that same keyword; Google will tell you if the competition is low, medium, or high. You want to pick keywords with the most searches and the least amount of competition.

3. Register your business – Many people don’t know about this crucial step, but if you want to make money online, you need to get a license. The U.S. Small Business Association (SBA) is a great resource on the laws and regulations in each state. Remember that there are federal, state and local regulations for businesses, even if you work from home to make money online.  “If you are operating your online business in a state that charges a sales tax; or levies a gross receipts or excise tax on businesses you may have to apply for a tax permit or otherwise register with your state revenue agency,” according to the SBA. “Online businesses are responsible for collecting state and local sales taxes from their customers when applicable, and paying these taxes to state and local revenue agencies.”

4. Make a Business Plan – You may just start out selling, say, your collection of baseball memorabilia, but what if your online business truly takes off? What if you run of out merchandise, but have a high demand? What if you need to expand quickly, hire staff, or rent warehouse space? Even though you make money online, you need to have a solid business plan for your website. Small Business BC will guide you how to setup a successful plan.

5. Become an Expert – You may sell products that are available on other websites, or services that others may find elsewhere, but what can set you apart is your expertise. Setting yourself up as an expert is not difficult on your website. Write blogs or articles that have relevance to what you’re offering. If you’re selling green products for example, share important news about alternatives to common products that can promote a green lifestyle. Share your own stories about your experiences and post pictures. Chances are, someone on your website will like what they read, and they will start to follow you. Then, they will be a client for life.

Need Help in Your Online Business?

The Behla Design is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of the top web design and development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copy writing professionals. Our founder, Andrew Behla, has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years. For more information about how to start an online business, contact Behla Design.

There are many reasons why you may want to set up a website, but before you do, you need to decide on a hosting solution for that site. Hosting gives your website a place to exist on the web. Here’s a great explanation for what website hosting is, according to HostGator.com: “The web-hosting or server is much like the space that you rent out to have your business in. It’s merely the space itself. It does not include furnishings like shelves for your products, just as the web-hosting account doesn’t include a site for you to sell your products…Without the hosting services, you won’t have a place for your files to reside, so your domain would then become like a disconnected phone number in the phone directory, and your site files would have nowhere to stay.”

Picking a hosting company might seem like a minor choice, but to me, it is one of the most important decisions you can make with your company. To some extent it is your entire presence as your site is the gateway to the business. I always recommend WP Engine to my clients who work with WordPress sites, and there are many reasons why.

What is WP Engine?

WP Engine is a hosting platform for WordPress sites. They only work with WordPress, so that means that all their software and hardware is designed specifically for these sites. They offer managed hosting, which means that they are involved in the back end of your hosting, protecting you from hacks, offering high speed for your site, as well as backing up your site daily, just in case.

Reasons Why WP Engine is the Best WordPress Hosting Solution

1. Security – One of the most important things a hosting company needs to offer is security from hacks. I have spent days restoring and fixing the websites of clients who chose to go with a cheaper hosting company. The best part is they will handle all security issues for you if a security issue occurs, so you don’t have to do anything. At no cost to you, they will work on restoring your site.

2. Speed – WP Engine claims that their new WordPress architecture, EverCache, will allow thousands of users to visit your site at the same time without your website experiencing slow speed or being taken offline. If you know that your site will experience heavy traffic, you can contact them to provide temporary measures to accommodate the traffic. Furthermore, Google tracks site speed with WP Engine. Google will penalize sites that can’t handle many visitors, and will not always recommend that website high in its search results. If your speed is fast, that’s much better for your search engine optimization (SEO), and will allow more visitors to find your site.

3. Backups – You don’t have to pay extra to backup your site in case a hack or a malfunction occurs. WP Engine offers time machine based backups so you can easily restore a previous version in case hacking occurs, and they have one click restore points. And the best part is that they backup your site every single day with a backup formula that they create nightly.

4. Development – Whether you will do this yourself, or turn to a professional, WP Engine is great for development. WP Engine has all of their sites on SSD drives (no moving parts) and is very tech heavy.  One great feature is that they offer a clone button of your live site that copies your site to staging environment. This is great for development as it create a “sandbox” site for development and testing without effecting your current, live site. They also have a staging environment (temp URL) to test the site before going live. These are some of the options they offer to developers, according to the WP Engine site:

“Having trouble running down a performance problem? We’ll do code-level PHP profiling to identify the issue and suggest code changes to address it, especially if there’s something inside our own architecture that you can take advantage of.

A PHP bug causing the white screen of death? We provide error logs to help you out.

Use direct SFTP access to your blog’s wp-content directory, so you can use your favorite HTML, CSS, and PHP editor on your laptop to customize your blog. No more editing code in little web fields!”

5. Support – The best part of a managed hosting company is the support they offer! Every single person who works at WP Engine is a WordPress expert, so if you’re having problems with a plugin, or have a question about updating a theme, you just need to contact them to hear their free, expert opinions!

The team at Behla Design is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of the top web design and development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copy writing professionals. Our founder, Andrew Behla, has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years.

If you’d like to discuss the best hosting options for your WordPress site, contact Behla Design.

We recently helped a client who complained that her WordPress site speed was very slow. She said that she had a big dip in online sales since clients did not want to wait around for her site to load. There are many reasons why your website speed may be slow. Below are five tips to improve website speed that are quick, easy and free.

Five Tips to Improve Website Speed

1. Use Website Speed Test – If you feel that your WordPress site is acting very slow, do an Internet Speed Test. Webpagetest.org is run by Google, and offers a free test of your site. It will give you a detailed summary with a website speed test score out of 100. It will also give details about the errors, load times, how long your site takes to fully load, etc. The site claims to “ run simple tests or perform advanced testing including multi-step transactions, video capture, content blocking and much more.” It will provide “rich diagnostic information including resource loading waterfall charts, Page Speed optimization checks and suggestions for improvements.” Doing the Internet speed test is important so you can see what the exact issue is that is preventing your website from operating at normal speed. Also, if you are planning to contact your website host, it will help to pinpoint the exact data about your website in the ticket request.

2. Compress Images – Dream Host recommends that you don’t just upload images to your site, but take the time to optimize each image. Big files slow down site speed, so resizing the photo to smaller dimensions will be optimal. Google developers recommend compressing images. They state that “image files are often created with extra information embedded in the file. For example, JPEG files written by many image programs include the name of the program that wrote them. PNG images can often be made smaller by changing the way the image is encoded. These transformations are lossless. That is, the compressed image looks identical to the uncompressed image, but uses fewer bytes.”

3. Reduce Files Sizes – Just like JPEGs and PDFS, other files also slow down website speed. The speed of your page loads often come down to reducing the size of the images on the page. Make sure to set your images to 72 pixels per inch and ideally size the image BEFORE you add it to WordPress. If you don’t have a native image editing application you can use an onilne one such as Pixlr. You might want to install WP Smush.it plugin which will reduce the size of the images of your site without having to edit them one by one. Check your CSS and JS files. CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) refers to text file formats that define things like the color and size of the text, as well as spaces and borders of information on the website. JS files are JavaScript, which control things like automatically changing the date, causing a linked-to page to pop up and allowing images or text to change when a mouse is rolled over them, according to Whatis.com. Obviously you need these files, so you cannot delete them from your WordPress site, but you can minify them. The plugin Better WordPress Minify will combine and compress your CSS and JS files, which will speed up your website. Another plugin called Lazy Load will only allow images to load when a visitor can see them.

4. Install W3 Total Cache – We’ve found that this plugin gives the most flexibility and levels of control to help improve your page loads. A web cache is a mechanism for the temporary storage (caching) of web documents, such as HTML pages and images, to reduce bandwidth usage, server load, and perceived lag. W3 Total Cache can address various way to reduce the page load with settings for browser cache, minify and even CDN integration.

5. Get better hosting or a CDN – Page speed is often reliant on your hosting. If your site is on a shared servers for instance, your resources are pooled together and a site with a lot of traffic will demand more resources. We like to use WP Engine for dedicated WordPress hosting as they have advanced caching built into their servers and a high level of security. SiteGround is a great hosting company that is WordPress friendly and has their own caching plugin that is included with their shared hosting plans. You might also consider using a CDN or Content Delivery Network such as MaxCDN which serves your site’s data from a location closer to where the user’s browser request is being made. W3 Total Cache is also compatible with MaxCDN and has an option to easily configure it in the settings for the plugin. These five simple tips will help you significantly alter the speed of your website and allow your visitors to visit and shop on your site in the manner they were supposed to.

The team at Behla Design is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of the top web design and development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copy writing professionals. Our founder, Andrew Behla, has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years.

If you still have questions about the slow speed of your website, , contact Behla Design.

If you have a website, you may have created it for many reasons, some of which are to write a blog with your opinions, post interesting photos, educate others, promote a business, have a social cause, or trying to make money through an online store. Either way, you want to attract as many people as possible to your site so they can read your blogs, shop at your e-commerce store or contact your company to engage in new business. While you may have created a great, easy-to-use site, and offered great insight or top-of-the-line products, one piece of advice I offer to my clients is to have relevant content. Content is very important for your online site, and I will give three reasons why in this blog.

Three Ways Content Writing Can Help Your Site

1. Keywords, keywords, keywords – Many website owners spend hundreds, even thousands, of dollars every month on advertising. There are various ways to do so, with ads running on other sites, or with pay-per-click advertising. However, there is a great way to see more traffic come to your site without spending any money, just some time on writing. Content writing is an underused, but very good way to help your website. All it means is that you create regular, quality, relevant content in the form of blogs or articles, and update them on your website.  If you use WordPress, it is very easy to maintain your blogs as WordPress is a content management solution with a system to publish blogs in an organized way.

The most effective way to incorporate content writing in your website is to do keyword research first. There are various ways to do keyword research, with paid and free programs. The most popular is Google Adwords, which will give you statistics for how often each keyword, or term, is searched for every month, and whether the competition for each term is low, medium, or high. You want to try and pick terms that have the lowest competition and the most possible people searching for them. This way, whether you advertise as well, you will have many keywords right on your site that will help new visitors find you.

Another great aspect about using content writing is that you can tailor the blog and the keywords to your city or neighborhood, if you have a local business. Say you sell bicycles in Chicago. To attract local clients to come into your store, you can write articles about different types of bicycles, and include keywords, such as purchasing bicycles in Chicago, or Chicago bike store. You can also write blogs about local events for bike riders, which will definitely get you some new visitors that may be searching for those same events. Those visitors can turn into potential new customers.

2. Relevance – So you have a website, but how do you compete with other sites and help people find you online? Before, all you needed were keywords and links throughout your site, which was pretty easy to do. But times have changed, and Google has gotten smarter. Now, for your website to have a chance to come out and beat the competition, and come up in the first few pages of the Google search, you need to have current and relevant content. That means that you need to spend the time to update your blogs and articles regularly, so that Google can sense that you have the latest news about your particular product. So spend time writing, and see your website gain more and more popularity with each month.

3. Expertise – “Demonstrate your expertise through content,” says LunaMetrics. ” A pizzeria near my house in Pittsburgh has an alternative menu on their site for people seeking gluten free pizza and Italian food and they’ve received press/links because of this. What’s your specialty? Blog about it, include it on your site and tell others.”

What sets you apart from all the other pizza places in your city? Through content writing, you can let potential customers know what your niche, or specialty is. You can write that you make your own sauce, or offer gluten-free pizza varieties, or even import cheese from Italy. Just having a regular site with your menu and address will not let individuals searching for a new pizza joint truly get to know you, but with some articles, you can make them feel like they’ve been to your spot already.

Are you selling vitamins online? It’s crucial for you to write credible blogs and link them to other expert sites. Write about the latest health news and breakthroughs, and include keywords and links to the products you sell. Chances are someone that is searching for an answer to their health question can come upon your article, and then may purchase one of your products. Wouldn’t that be great, without you spending a single dollar on advertising? Remember, the more in-depth and relevant your articles are, the more probability that someone will trust that you’re an expert in your field, and will come back to your online website again and again.

The team at Behla Design is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of the top web design and development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copy writing professionals. Our founder, Andrew Behla, has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years.

If you’d like to discuss creating content writing for your website, contact Behla Design.

If you have a WordPress website, you will want to have a well-functioning search field. Whether you have an online store and want your visitors to be able to find a product easily, or have a blog, and want your readers to quickly access articles about topics that interest them, a good search field is vital to a site.

Many WordPress themes have their own search options. It’s important to remember that the themes offer different WordPress templates, and not actual search pages. WordPress templates are “the files which control how your WordPress site will be displayed on the Web. These files draw information from your WordPressMySQL database and generate the HTML code which is sent to the web browser. Through its powerful Theme system, WordPress allows you to define as few or as many Templates as you like all under one Theme,” according to WordPress.

Many people have criticized the WordPress search option as having too many downfalls. For example, it doesn’t give as much value to articles that are older versus newer. WordPress gives results based on date and not relevance. Also, the keyword search isn’t ideal as it mostly looks for direct matches, so if you typed in “blue jeans,” chances are you are not going to find any products with just the term “jeans.”

If your theme does not offer a search template at all, or if you would like to create your own WordPress search page, you can search for various WordPress search templates. We will provide a few of our favorites below.

WordPress Search Templates

1. Google Custom Search – If you are a fan of searching on Google, chances are you will like it as a WordPress search template for your site. You can install it, and it will rewrite the general WordPress search template to a Google search. Google offers free and paid WordPress templates for search fields.

According to Google, if you pick Google as your WordPress search template, you can:

Google Custom Search

• Create a CSE at any time and Google will give you a landing page with a unique URL. You also have the option of applying your own site’s look and feel.
• Invite friends and colleagues to collaborate and contribute to your search engine, enhancing its usefulness to your community.
• Provide your own search refinements within results pages so it’s easier for your users to find the information they’re looking for.
• Easily add more sites to your search engine’s index as you surf the web.
• New! You can create a CSE on the fly simply by cutting and pasting a few lines of code into your website’s HTML. Your new automatically generated CSE will let people search the websites you’ve linked to, as well as the sites they link to. For instance, if you’ve created a directory, a blog roll, or a list of online resources, your CSE will enable your users to search across these sites and the sites they reference.<

The paid version starts at $100 per year, and allows customization. You can specify which sites you want Google to search; if you have multiple websites, you can set up Google to search through all your websites, instead of just the one.

Check out this video to learn more.

2. Relevanssi – Relevanssi is another option for a WordPress search engine. It replaces the standard WordPress search with a custom option that allows the user to customize its look and feel. Since many WordPress search users complain that the standard search doesn’t show the best results first, Relevanssi claim that they have the best search template, which not only brings up the most relevant results, but also shows which part of the site the results are from. Here is a link for a full list of features.

Relevanssi

When we contacted the developer to ask why he believes his WordPress template is better than others, this is what he said:

– The ability to give taxonomies and custom fields keyword weights not only per custom post type, but per taxonomy/meta_name per custom post type
– Keyword weight attribution
– Supplemental Search Engines
– PDF indexing built in
– Index is managed in real time, no need to manually reindex
– Lots of Extensions (more coming all the time!) https://searchwp.com/extensions/­­

There is a free version, which has over 250,000 downloads, and a premium version, which starts at $40 per year (see prices here). According to the site, the benefits of the premium version include:

• Guaranteed support. Free version users get support if I have enough time available.
• Additional features. Relevanssi is developed actively and new features are added. Free version users won’t get the new features, or get them long after Premium users have enjoyed them.
• Future development. More users for Relevanssi Premium means I can spend more time developing the plugin.

Better Search

3. Better Search – Aptly named, Better Search is a third option for a custom WordPress search template. It claims to give relevant weight to the title and content of a post to match a search query, making it a better option than the standard WordPress search, which searches by date. It even gives site owners the option to assign more weight to the title or the content in searches.

Here are the features that the site lists:

• Automatic: Once activated, Better Search will automatic replace your default WordPress search with more relevant search results
• Relevance: Search results sorted by relevance automatically sorted by relevance. You can also turn off relevancy based searching, in which results are sorted by date
• Control the results: Fine tune results by changing the weighting of post title and post content. Turn on BOOLEAN search to override the default NATURAL LANGUAGE search of mySQL
• Popular searches: Find out what visitors are searching for on your blog. Display a list of popular search terms (daily and overall) on your blog in the form of a heatmap. Widget support for easy integration in your theme
• Customisation: Support for a template file for perfect integration into your blog template. Alternatively, just input your own CSS styles in the Custom Styles tab in the Settings Page. Check the FAQ for more information
• Supports cache plugins: Works with caching plugins like WP-Super-Cache and W3 Total Cache

Basically, you have the option to use the default WordPress search template in your site, or pick one of the above templates to customize your search to your preference. Some of the options are paid, and others are free; I recommend reading the features and figuring out what would work best for your site.

The team at Behla Design is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of the top web design and development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copy writing professionals. Our founder, Andrew Behla, has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years.

For more information about making your site mobile friendly, contact Behla Design.

So you decided to start a blog. You signed up for WordPress, built a pretty decent site, and started blogging regularly. A week passed, then a month, and you don’t see much change in terms of comments or followers? That is a common problem that most “newbies” face when deciding to set up a WordPress blog. This is why I want to share how going the extra mile will truly make a difference in attracting more visibility for your WordPress blog. And the best part is that the recommendations below are completely free, that’s right gratis! So, by spending a couple of hours integrating these plugins into your site, you should see a big improvement in your WordPress site’s popularity.

Top Two Social Media Plugins for Your WordPress Blog

1. ShareThis – This is what the creators of ShareThis say: “Whether you want the simplest, most robust tools to turn your media social, or to find the right audience for your advertising message, ShareThis puts sharing to work for you. Use the most innovative social media and sharing platform for the Web, ShareThis.” Simply put, this is a widget that you can customize for your blog. When visitors read your content, they can click on the button, and choose which social media forum they’d like to share your blog on. The options are Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, Myspace, etc.

Additionally, ShareThis provides you with analytics of your site. The analytics allow you to:

• Unlock the social value of your website with SQI (social quality of a website)
• Discover your most shared content
• Evaluate the top outbound and inbound social channels

By checking your analytics, ShareThis allows you to see activity that is happening on your site, find what content is the most popular, view which social media sites and other referrals direct traffic to your site the most, etc.

ShareThis was ranked #35 in Forbes’ America’s Most Promising Companies List for the second year in a row.
2. Livefyre –  This is what the site says about Livefyre: “Livefyre helps companies engage consumers through a combination of real-time conversation, social curation and social advertising.” Basically, Livefyre is a plugin that allows visitors to not only comment on your site, but to share their comments and the actual post on Facebook and Twitter. In addition, all comments that are created from that share to Facebook or Twitter will publish back to the WordPress blog post. In other words, even though the commenter might not comment on the blog itself, they can comment on Facebook, Twitter, and then Livefyre publishes it back to the the original blog post. The idea is that your site becomes the hub for all social commenting/discussion.

If this sounds pretty cool, you’re not the only one who thinks so. Their network powers real-time experiences across one billion page views each month. They reach 15 million registered users and 130 million unique visitors per month across 50,000 installations. Also, users see an increase of up to 10 times in user engagement after installing Livefyre.

Top Two Analytics Plugins for Your WordPress Blog

1. Google Analytics – One of the most important things you can do for your WordPress blog is to check its analytics. Google Analytics analyzes your site’s engagement and reports back to you. First, Google Analytics helps familiarize you with their plugin by offering a setup checklist and a getting started guide. This way, even if you’re never analyzed your WordPress blog with Google Analytics, you will easily be able to learn how to start. Second, if you still have questions, you can visit the help center to read articles that can help you along the way. Furthermore, you can visit the Google Analytics YouTube Channel to watch helpful videos.

“Google Analytics not only lets you measure sales and conversions, but also gives you fresh insights into how visitors use your site, how they arrived on your site, and how you can keep them coming back,” according to their site. What that means is that Google Analytics will show you how many people visited your site, how they found your site – through keywords, or through another source, and if they clicked on any links on your WordPress blog. This way, you can see what content on your site is the most popular, and which social media sites are bringing the most traffic to you. Having this knowledge will help you get even more visitors, because you can see which topics are most interesting to your readers, and focus on writing about them. Or, when you see which social media sites, for example Facebook, direct the most people to your site, you can focus on promoting your content on that site through paid advertisements or giveaways and promotions.

2. Google FeedBurner – This is a top website for feeds. What are feeds? The site explains that “feeds are a way for websites large and small to distribute their content well beyond just visitors using browsers. Feeds permit subscription to regular updates, delivered automatically via a web portal, news reader, or in some cases good old email. Feeds also make it possible for site content to be packaged into “widgets,” “gadgets,” mobile devices, and other bite-sized technologies that make it possible to display blogs, podcasts, and major news/sports/weather/whatever headlines just about anywhere.”

Have you seen this button on a website recently? Surely, you have. This button lets you subscribe and then read, watch or listen to content in any format, text, audio or video. This lets users keep up with their favorite websites without having to visit each one. And this is good news for you, because your WordPress blog updates will be automatically sent to those that sign up for them. So you don’t have to worry about visitors remembering to come back and read your content. The great news, is that your WordPress blog likely generates its own feed, so you don’t have to do anything to get it started!

FeedBurner offers Feedburner Stats, which allows you to get a good overview of your audience. This is what FeedBurner states that it provides:

• “Subscription data (e.g. number of subscribers by day, previous week, last 30 days and all time) and Reach data (the estimated number of individuals clicking or viewing your feed content in a given day)
• Breakdown of feed readers and aggregators, email services, web browsers and bots by which subscribers are accessing your content
• Clickthrough tracking
• Uncommon uses — sites where your content has been resyndicated including other blogs, directories and even spam sites
• Item enclosure downloads (podcasts)
• Live hits, conveniently translated to your local time zone”

While it takes some effort to connect the dots, if you want to have a successful blog with a large following, doing a few, easy steps that don’t cost any money can help you go the extra mile!

The team at Behla Design, Graphic Design & Web Development, is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of top web design, web development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copywriting professionals and has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years. 

Contact us today to find out how we can help your next project.