Are you one of the many online publishers using WordPress? As your blog or site grows you’ll need to decipher which hosting solution benefits you the most. We won’t keep you in suspense: Cloud Hosting IS the answer. This post is here to explain why.

Hello WordPress

WordPress is the ultimate in user friendly blogging and CMS platforms. The fact is, WP is an open source godsend that has made it possible for millions of people–most with little to no web design and development experience–the opportunity to customize a website to fit their needs and vision.

Themes, plugins and widgets are changing the way web newbies and techie experts alike design online content. And as WP enters into its tenth year, we should see even more developments that make publishing web content easy and accessible to the masses.

WordPress, Meet the Cloud

The term cloud is thrown around all over the place these days. It certainly wins the award for most popular marketing buzzword in 2013, anyway (funny enough, its such a buzzword it’s made the term buzzword a buzzword in the blogosphere, believe it or not). But I digress.

Anyway, just remember that the “cloud” is just that: a trendy term.

What cloud computing really means is that accessing data can now be done very easily over the Internet, rather than on your computer’s hard drive. So rather than downloading software and tech resources locally, it is available in an overarching network that spans the Internet. This makes life easier for both IT wizards and common folk.

So what does this mean for WordPress users? The four S’s: Speed, Scale, Support, and Security.

WordPress + Cloud = <3

Some bloggers and marketers try to call out hosting companies for making the concept of the cloud seem too “magical”, alluding that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. They’re wrong. WordPress hosting in the cloud is a match made in heaven.

• Security: As mentioned above, WordPress is extremely popular. Thus, hackers find it pretty alluring. The great thing is, our WP cloud hosting is offered with: redundant firewalls, DDoS protection, custom firewall rules, malware scanning, and more.
• Support: Giving quick, well rounded tech support is simple in the cloud. Diagnosing errors is pretty easy as well with such access. What’s more, if one server on the network crashes, it’s backed up by multiple other sources–meaning no downtime for your precious site.
• Scale: Making things cost effective and efficient, the cloud hosting solution for your WP site allows for scalability. This means you can scale any and all of your resources as you go, with complete control of RAM, disk space, CPU cores, and bandwidth.
• Speed: Things are just quicker in the cloud. Users lack patience, and with the CDN of a WP site hosted in the cloud, things come at your users quickly, giving them no time to navigate away from your page or move on to some other shiny object.

Check out more WordPress articles!

• Top 10 Amazing WordPress Plugins You Shouldn’t Miss
• Top 15 Premium WordPress Themes for a Wedding
• 25 Excellent Personal WordPress Themes
• ThemeFuse Review: Launching a New WordPress Site Is No Longer a Hassle!
• Top Solutions for Easy Online Payments on WordPress

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What is it exactly?

Just to give you a quick summary of the whole service, here’s a short elevator pitch: It allows you to pick a theme from ThemeFuse’s gallery and have it installed by their team, on an optimized hosting platform, and under a new domain (of your choosing). From a client’s point of view, this is great because the only thing you have to do is choose a theme and your work is done. Then after a while, you end up with a fully functional WordPress site. Cool, isn’t it?

Who is this for?

The official press release says that it’s for beginners in the WordPress world who don’t want to deal with all the hassle that’s usually involved when building a site. That is true. However, I’d say that it’s also for anyone who simply can’t be bothered to set everything up on their own and would rather have it done by someone else. Hence it’s also a good deal for pro developers and designers.

Does it work?

Here’s the thing, creating a product for beginners is actually really really really hard due to something called the curse of knowledge. The curse of knowledge is, for example, what prevents you from explaining a basic concept of an area that you are an expert in to a complete beginner. In other words, it’s when the scope of your knowledge makes it impossible for you to switch to a beginner state of mind and be able to deliver value in an easy to grasp way.

This is ultimately the reason why no one understands university professors when they try to explain things… And sometimes, it’s also a problem with many “beginner” products in various niches. So today, I want to check if this new service has similar issues or not. This is how I’m going to do this – my original testing method:

• The service gets a credit of 10 points to start with.
• I’m going to go through the entire setup process and try acting like I’m completely new.
• If something isn’t clear, that’s -1 point.
• At the end of the test, we’ll have the final score.

The test begins

To take advantage of this new offer, all you have to do is go to ThemeFuse.com and click the promotional banner/bar that’s right at the top of the homepage. When you do so, you’ll be redirected to the official signup page.

Quite a long page, but it explains the main idea behind the service pretty clearly, so it’s surely worth a read. There’s a signup button at the bottom.

After clicking it, you’ll end up straight in the theme gallery, where you can choose whatever theme you like (every theme is included in this new service). After browsing around for a while I’ve decided to go with Conexus. 

The sales page for every theme itself is very clear with a visible buy button. But the next step – after clicking this buy button – can cause some problems. It’s an order customization page, and unfortunately, I’m going to have to call “-1″ on that (yeah, let’s keep this review honest). Here’s the problem, this is what this order customization page looks like:

Since I’m interested in the “theme-domain-hosting” package, I clicked the big blue box at the bottom of the screen, which led straight back to the page where I started this whole journey. Not a serious issue, but still a little misleading. Anyway, the thing you should click here is either the BUY STANDARD version button or the BUY DEVELOPER version button (in most cases it’s the former). Okay, let’s do that and see what happens.

Everything is back on track in this step. There’s a very clear confirmation page where you can click the orange button and get started with the new service. The next screen:

This is where you have the possibility to get a new domain along with your package (the domain is optional; you can skip it if you already have one). By the way, if you decide to get a domain, it’s free for the first year. You get to choose from domains under.com, .net, .org, .biz, and .info. After clicking the Review Order button you’ll see the final confirmation page.

This is where you can check if everything is alright, pick a payment method, input a discount code if you have one, and finally proceed to checkout. One more step you have to take care of before the checkout itself is the signup page for a client account at ThemeFuse.

What follows next is a standard PayPal payment procedure (if you’ve selected PayPal as your payment method). I don’t think any screenshots are necessary here… It’s a pretty standard PayPal transaction. Lastly, after successfully completing the transaction you can go back to ThemeFuse (through the link provided inside PayPal). Well, apparently, that’s it for the whole purchase process. All that follows now is an email from ThemeFuse informing you that the site is up and running.

Now here’s the best part. Literally 15 minutes after completing my purchase, my new domain was live, and I could access the site’s Dashboard via the client panel at ThemeFuse.com. Again, that’s 15 minutes. (Note. This is a fully functional WordPress site. So you get unlimited access to the Dashboard, where you can publish posts, pages, create new user accounts, install plugins and so on.)

The good

To be honest, I love everything about this service. It’s clear, the signup form is impressively simple, and the whole idea itself is superb. The main element where this service stands out is its ease of use. You really don’t need any experience in order to handle the signup process. Everyone can do it.

The bad

If you’ve read this closely then you’ve noticed there’s only one “-1″ moment. And to be honest, it wasn’t even that serious. Just a single, little misleading message for people landing on the order page. The signup process itself is so simple that it’s really hard for me to find anything else wrong with it. And believe me, I tried. I even waited for the session to invalidate and did other similarly strange things, but nothing bad happened. More than that, I made my test on Saturday, and even despite this the site was live within 15 minutes.

Plans and pricing

ThemeFuse sells their themes for a variety of price points. The standard range is $49 to $99 for a standard license (there’s also one free theme). The hosting package is $69 a year. In the end, to get started, you need $128 in total, and that’s exactly what I paid during the test.

The bottom line

Let’s compare this service to the traditional way of launching a WordPress site. Usually, you have to do the following things:

1. Get a domain.
2. Choose and buy a hosting account.
3. Connect the two together (not always that simple).
4. Install WordPress (either by hand or through an auto-installer).
5. Get a theme and upload it to your hosting account.
6. Install the theme itself.

With this new service, on the other hand, there’s just one step:

1. Pick a theme at ThemeFuse and tell them to handle the setup process for you.

I mean, you can’t beat that. I believe that this service truly is the perfect solution for every beginner to get a site as quickly and effortlessly as possible. What do you think? If you decide to take advantage of this service, don’t forget to shot me a message and let me know how it went. Please don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed or follow Inspirationfeed on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook! If you enjoyed the following article we humbly ask you to comment, and help us spread the word!

Nowadays, however, WordPress allows you to launch any kind of website, and the only limit is your imagination (or skill, or budget).

It wasn’t long before people realized that if they wanted to sell something through a website, instead of hiring web developers and paying them $10,000 or more per project (no joke; I know this because I have some first-hand experience with developers), they could just launch a site on WordPress and then integrate it with various payment solutions for a fraction of the price.

Now, there are a couple of different types of payments you can enable on a WordPress site, so let’s discuss them one by one.

Donations and “by the way” payments

A “by the way” payment happens when a visitor decides to send some money to the website owner for no other reason than to make a donation. There’s no product or service being sold.

Even though this technique hasn’t made anyone rich yet, many people include it on their sites just to cover their hosting and other common costs of running a website.

The easiest way to enable such payments is to integrate your site with PayPal. The plugin I recommend for that is called WP Easy PayPal Payment Accept. It lets you place a PayPal box in the sidebar or inside your posts and pages.

(Apart from donations, you can also use it for product or service sales.)

Standard e-commerce stores

An e-commerce store is simply a website that displays a line of products and enables a shopping cart solution, through which every visitor can pick and purchase the products.

This is probably the most crowded space when it comes to the available WordPress plugins. There are truly some excellent solutions out there, and a lot of them are free.

GetShopped WP e-Commerce. It’s a complete online store platform, which means that it doesn’t require any third party apps or services. It integrates with a number of payment processors like: Google Checkout, PayPal, Payment Express, and more.

The main plugin is free, but there are paid upgrades, in case you ever decide that the default set of features is not enough.

WooCommerce. The plugin is a creation of the guys behind WooThemes. This time, they bring you a complete online store solution, in some ways similar to GetShopped. There’s extensive online payment integration with services like: PayPal, Mijireh, and others.

The plugin is free, but it will certainly work best with a WooThemes’ theme – which are mostly paid.

Direct and recurring payments

The solutions presented above require you to connect with an external payment processor (like PayPal), which will handle all payments for you.

In some cases, it’s better to process payments directly (something we’ve talked about in one of the recent posts). As a merchant, you get more control over your money, don’t have to pay those massive fees, and you can enable automatic recurring payments.

ACH Payments is a solution that lets you do just that. You get to process the payments made by your customers, and you can automate the collection procedure. This comes especially handy if you have any recurring payments, as you no longer have to go back and forth with your customers and remind them to send you a check.

One more important issue with payment processing (from a legal point of view) is that if you’re handling payments yourself, you have to protect and backup the payment data (you can get fined if you don’t). ACH Payments handles this too.

Authorize.net is another solution for direct payments. The company provides tools for fast credit card processing, mobile apps, fraud prevention tools, professional support, and many other services to make your life easier as a merchant.

Auctions and other models

One more individual type of websites dealing with various payments is an auction site. Even though giants like eBay are what comes to mind first when the topic of online auctions get mentioned, many small auction sites exist in various niches and actually make some healthy profits too.

If that’s the site for you then consider WP Auctions. It’s a paid plugin, but it basically turns your WordPress site into a complete online auction platform. There’s a number of bidding engines available, and a load of other features. The plugin integrates with PayPal for payments.

That’s it for my list of payment solutions for your website. Feel free to comment if you have any questions or suggestions for even more ways of handling online payments on WordPress.

Check out our previous articles!

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It’s estimated that almost 70% of the developers use WordPress for building a blog or website. Tell designers that you want a website built cheap, yet with zero compromises on quality, they will suggest WordPress. Since, the time it made its appearance way back in 2003, it has keep adding to its repertoire, and its various releases have just made this platform bigger and better.

Let’s take a journey through the various WordPress releases and see how these updates revolutionized the way we blog and what we expect from a CMS platform.

Version 0.7 Released on May 7, 2003

Today, only the 0.71 Gold version is officially available for download from the WordPress Release Archives Page, nevertheless there is no doubt that its launch almost 10 years ago started a revolution. Developers could use features like Highly Intelligent Line Breaks, New Administration Interface, Manual Excerpts and New Default Templates, default plugins for better navigations etc. to create websites and blogs that were as good, if not better, than those built with proprietary software.

It can safely be said that the release of WordPress gave everybody who wanted an affordable online presence, the power to dream big, and dream cutting edge.

1.2 Mingus released on May 22, 2004

A year later, the Mingus update arrived, which added features like sub categories, for adding categories in a single sub category (great for ecommerce sites); another important addition was encrypted passwords and cookies, which offered better security; advanced comment moderation, was another feature that made blog commenting simpler and spam free; also bloggers could now view their post with the post preview feature; feature liker and Live Journal Importer ensured that blog followers are updated with the latest news from the blog or site. These and other features, further cemented WordPress’s position as a top notch blogging platform.

1.5 Strayhorn and 2.0 Duke Released in 2005

Two updates by the WordPress community in 2005 really set the ball rolling for some great open source website development. The Strayhorn update was more about blog management, managing latest updates, and customization of default templates. The Duke update gave a boost to the WordPress admin panel and made it faster; it offered a feature called Redesigned Backend which offered on- demand customization of the background; other features included spam and backup plugins, resizable editing, streamlined importing and lots more.

2.1 Ella, 2.2 Getz, and 2.3 Dexter Released in 2007

The expectations with WordPress kept growing, and to keep up with the demand, three versions were released in 2007.

Ella offered features like autosave, that saved your post automatically, a new search engine privacy option, that helped you indicate search engines shouldn’t index your blog, more AJAX integration, faster admin and more visual consistency and much more.

Getz was an update that offered security fixes and tried to plug all the big and small holes in the WordPress blog. An important change that it brought to WordPress is that widgets that were available as plugins were now made available in the core and default themes.

The Dexter update focused on next generation features like native tagging support that allowed users to tag their posts, update notification giving info about any plugin or WordPress update, canonical URLs, advance WYSIWYG and more.

2.5 Brecker, 2.6 Tynerand 2.7 Coltrane Released in 2008

Continuing the tradition of releasing a new update every four months, the WordPress community released three more in 2008. The focus here was upgrading the functionality of the platform and offering users a superlative experience. More designing templates made their appearance on the scene; you could now add videos and pictures to the website; and plugins could now get automatically updated through the administration interface.

2.8 Baker Released in 2009

In a break from tradition, only one update released in 2009, which was the 2.8 Baker. The most notable addition offered was that you could now go through the various themes, from the WordPress dashboard. The Theme Browser feature helped you specify columns, width, and color of the theme; redesigned widget interface, bug fixes, better speed, were just some of the many other features of this update.

2.9 Carmen, 3.0 Thelonious Released in 2010

The Carmen update came with features like Global undo/”trash”, allowing you to restore a deleted post or comment from trash; Built-in image editor allowed users to crop, edit, rotate, flip and scale images; better SEO with rel=canonical; easier video embeds wherein, you just need to paste URL for it to convert into an embeded code, and much more.

In the 3.0 Thelonious, features included a new default theme called Twenty Ten; developers had new APIs for easy implementation of headers, menus, post types etc.; new lighter interface; bulk updates, and many more.

3.1 Reinhardt, 3.2 Gershwin and 3.3 Sony Released in 2011

We are now back two three updates in a calendar year, beginning with Reinhardt, with this release the idea was to make WordPress a better CMS platform. Features like redesigned linking workflow, helping easier linking of existing posts and pages; admin bar to access popular dashboard pages quickly; post formats support for simplifying creation of portable tumblelogs; enhanced CMS capabilities for archiving pages for custom content types and many more made this a great CMS platform.

The sole focus of Gershwin was to boost the speed of WordPress and make it lighter. It offered a tight new dashboard design, an HTML 5 new Twenty Eleven theme, a redesigned post editor, distraction free writing or Zen mode, and other great features.

Honoring the Jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt, the 3.3 Sonny update offered features like pointer tips to new users of WordPress, better co-editing support, amongst many other improvements. Here the focus was also on ensuring that even tablet users have a satisfying user experience while using WordPress.

And finally, 3.4 Green, 3.5 Elvin released in 2012

The Green update included significant upgrades to image captions, Twitter embeds and theme customization.

3.5 Elvin focuses on offering next generation features like support for Retina Display, a new Twenty Twelve theme, improved image workflow and many more.

End Words

Through its decade of existence, WordPress has continuously made the effort to reinvent itself to suit the needs and demands of users and developers. This has made it into the platform it is today, and I am sure 2013 will see another update/s that will further enhance the features and functionalities of WordPress.

Check out our previous articles:

• WordPress Secrets that Enterprise CMS Vendors Don’t Want you to Know
• Do You Have Enough Bandwidth on Your WordPress Host?
• Free WordPress Themes Released in Summer 2012
• How To Add Google Analytics to WordPress Multisite
• Increase Social Media Traffic – 7 Free WordPress Plugins

We hope you enjoyed this article! Please don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed or follow Inspirationfeed on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook! If you enjoyed the following article we humbly ask you to comment, and help us spread the word!

With the rise in digital communications and the widespread use of tablets and smartphones, mobile internet is gaining momentum as the preferred way to access the web. Since 2010, mobile usage has increased 500 percent year-to-year with average smartphone usage tripling in that same time. And just over 10 percent of all web page visits are made from a mobile internet connection via smartphone or tablet. Mobile is growing exponentially – it’s even forecasted to surpass desktop internet usage as early as 2015.

With such an emphasis on mobile browsing, there’s no doubt that “responsive design” is at the forefront of every web professional’s mind.

Responsive web design—or “RWD”—ensures your site is visually appealing no matter what kind of environment it confronts. Through CSS media queries, site layouts are rendered depending on what kind of browser is detected whether on desktop, smartphone or tablet. Responsive design is important because it provides the end user with the best possible website experience without the need to squint, pinch, zoom, or exit the site due to a poor experience when accessed via mobile. In other words, responsive design is intelligent because it allows websites to adapt to different environments on-the-fly while providing the best possible visual experience for the end user.

Give your website visitors an easy, productive mobile experience and gain the rewards with increased pageviews, leads, and conversions.

Here’s how.

Plugins for Responsive Design

Instantly transform your WordPress based site into responsive design without the typical development costs associated with creating a separate mobile site. These plugins solve common problems associated with mobile browsing such as navigation, photo gallery or video.

1. WordPress Responsive Mobile Pack

The WordPress Responsive Mobile Pack is a toolkit packed with responsive essentials including a “mobile switcher” that automatically suggests desktop or mobile presentation, custom color variations, image rescaling, mobile ad resizing, and a wide selection of mobile themes.

Download Here

2. WP Fluid Images

For basic informational websites, you may only need the WP Fluid Images plugin – an essential tool that removes height and width attributes from graphics placed on pages or posts. It replaces CSS image attributes with fluid percentages instead, allowing for a visually suitable experience whether your site is accessed via mobile or desktop.

Download Here

3. FitVids jQuery Plugin

Like images, videos can also cause problems due to typical CSS styles that don’t jive with mobile. Videos often result in stifled bandwidth, pinching, zooming or exiting the website entirely. FitVids jQuery plugin solves the issue by resizing videos into fluid form, eliminating the cumbersome experience ordinarily associated with video on mobile.

Download Here

4. WP Mobile Detect

The WP Mobile Detect plugin solves common problems associated with large files such as photo galleries, chat functions, streaming, graphics and audio that can choke when accessed on smartphones or tablets. Now you can prevent large files from loading on mobile with the use of an easy shortcode.

Download Here

5. Responsive Select Menu

Navigation and menus can be visually challenging on a mobile device, but the Responsive Select Menu plugin resolves the issue by turning them into a select box instead. The plugin converts WordPress 3.0 menus into responsive select boxes, taking up less real estate on pages without space to spare. It’s easier for the user and works automatically – no extra PHP code is necessary.

Download Here

Check out our previous articles:

• WordPress Secrets that Enterprise CMS Vendors Don’t Want you to Know
• Do You Have Enough Bandwidth on Your WordPress Host?
• Free WordPress Themes Released in Summer 2012
• How To Add Google Analytics to WordPress Multisite
• Increase Social Media Traffic – 7 Free WordPress Plugins

We hope you enjoyed this article! Please don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed or follow Inspirationfeed on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook! If you enjoyed the following article we humbly ask you to comment, and help us spread the word!

Why?

With over 70 million websites running on WordPress and almost half of the top 100 blogs using it, there’s no doubt about its popularity.

Wordpress currently owns 55% market share for all CMS and it’s often the only option recommended by a large majority of bloggers online.

In fact, if you’re new to online technology you’ll almost be convinced that WordPress is the only option for creating blogs and websites.

The good news is it isn’t!

Wordpress is great and has its own VERY BIG market share; it has created solutions and businesses for people online. If you want custom WordPress themes, specialized WordPress Hosting or you want to hire a designer to help you customize your blog, there are countless options.

This article isn’t written to attack WordPress but to make you realize that, while WordPress is great, you don’t necessarily have to use it. There are advantages and disadvantages to using WordPress, but you’re only often reading about the advantages.

It’s important to take note of these disadvantages and consider using an alternative, especially if you’re a small business that needs a website.

Here are 5 valid reasons you might not want to use WordPress.

1. It Can be Very Vulnerable

The number one disadvantage to using WordPress that most WordPress users aren’t aware of is how vulnerable WordPress can be.

Wordpress is open source and relies on a community of developers to come up with the resources you’ll need to customize it; this includes themes and plugins.

Every theme or plugin you use on your WordPress site is written by a different person; since there’s no particular organization/body that monitors WordPress themes or plugins, this mean there could be a bug in the plugin you use on your site.

In case you don’t know this, with WordPress, a single plugin can allow access to your admin dashboard; unless you’re actively taking measures to secure your WordPress blog, then you can’t be totally assured.

Also, WordPress runs on PHP and stores important details in your MYSQL database which leaves a potential for SQL injection attacks. Being vulnerable to brute force attacks is also one major disadvantage of using WordPress, unless you install a plugin to counter this.

2. It Can be Very Expensive

No, don’t get me wrong. WordPress is “free”. It’s free to download and install WordPress but having just WordPress is not going to work, unless you don’t want your website to stand out from a large part of the 70+ million websites using WordPress.

You see WordPress everywhere and when you start seeing the same version of a site using WordPress, it becomes less memorable; that’s why WordPress is expensive.

To ensure your WordPress blog is properly designed and always active, you’ll have to spend several thousands of dollars.

Also, with the numerous WordPress updates and changes being rolled out regularly it’s only a matter of time before you start having issues with your “outdated” design and you’ll often have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to ensure your WordPress website is active again.

The only way out of this is to be a WordPress designer yourself.

3. You Have to Constantly Update Your Website

This is designed to be a good thing but when you consider the frequency of WordPress updates and the compatibility issues that come with it (updating plugins etc.) then it’s not necessarily a good thing.

With every update, you risk issues with your website template – which often costs thousands of dollars – and some of your plugins.

Maintenance in WordPress is a whole issue on its own; you can’t use WordPress without constantly updating it and you have to be ready to make changes to your template or plugins when you update.

If you have the budget, a designer or programmer or the resources to manage these updates, WordPress is great. Otherwise, you might want to stick to using other solutions.

4. WordPress Uses a Lot of Resources

For WordPress to be very effective, you’ll often have to install a lot of plugins.

A basic WordPress installation is useless and requires a theme and at least a few plugins to work effectively. On the surface, this isn’t much of a problem but the more WordPress plugins you install the slower your website becomes.

What if you can’t do without these plugins and what if you don’t have the budget or resources for coding these features into your WordPress template? You go for an increasingly slowing website.

In terms of server resources, WordPress also uses a lot more resources than a plain HTML website or a PHP template site so, unless you find a quality WordPress hosting solution, you risk being suspended by your host if you get a lot of visitors and use WordPress on a shared hosting.

5. You Can Easily Run into SEO Issues

It’s important to pay special attention to this unless you already have SEO access.

Wordpress is purported to be very SEO friendly but the reality is that almost every open source CMS is. WordPress can easily get you into SEO problems if you don’t have SEO knowledge; a major culprit is the tagging and category system used by WordPress.

Unless you decide to make your tags and categories “noindex”, every single tag you create and every single category you add your content to will have a duplicate form of that content. As a result, some people have 10 versions of the same content and wonder why they’re experiencing the same issue.

If you have advanced SEO knowledge, this won’t be an issue but not everybody possesses this kind of knowledge. Most of the people reading this article probably didn’t know this until today.

WordPress Alternatives

While this article contains some valid points, it won’t be complete without listing some quality WordPress alternatives.

Since almost every other CMS has the same issues as WordPress, I will be listing HTML site builders in the alternative sections. Don’t be deceived though, you’ll get quality looking websites with these tools that are built online in a breeze.

1. Easy WebContent

One of the best WordPress alternatives available online today, this is tool that provides an HTML site builder and an HTML website editor to help people create better looking websites.

Easy WebContent costs a monthly fee and helps you host your website, your content and everything else. You will also be provided with a WYSIWYG editor and can customize your site to look however you want even if you’re not a designer. There’s also a blog feature if you want a blog as an addon to your website.

2. Wix

Similar to Easy WebContent mentioned above, Wix also has a set of features that allow you to build professional websites that doesn’t rely on WordPress.

The two tools listed above will help you create good looking, WYSIWYG websites without having to rely on WordPress or experience the hassles that come with it.

3. Tumblr

Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything. Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos from your browser, phone, desktop, email or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors to your theme’s HTML. Tumblr is 100% free, however you can purchase high quality themes if you wish.

4. Squarespace

Squarespace starts you with beautiful templates right out of the box — each handcrafted by our award-winning design team to make your content stand out. Whether you need simple pages, sophisticated galleries, or a professional blog – it all comes standard with your Squarespace website. If you sign up now, you will get a 14 day free trial.

5. Virb

Share Your Own WordPress Alternatives?

I know there are other WordPress alternatives but the two listed above are the ones I’ve experienced. What other site builder can you recommend as a WordPress alternative? Is there a WordPress disadvantage I failed to mention in this article?

Check out our previous articles:

• WordPress Secrets that Enterprise CMS Vendors Don’t Want you to Know
• Do You Have Enough Bandwidth on Your WordPress Host?
• Free WordPress Themes Released in Summer 2012
• How To Add Google Analytics to WordPress Multisite
• Increase Social Media Traffic – 7 Free WordPress Plugins

We hope you enjoyed this article! Please don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed or follow Inspirationfeed on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook! If you enjoyed the following article we humbly ask you to comment, and help us spread the word!

Always cache

Caching is a method wherein data like html pages, images, and the like are stored temporarily. This is also used to accelerate the loading time of a WordPress site. WordPress offers free plug-ins designed to cache data easily and this is ideal for most average users. The most popular plugin we would like to recommend is W3 Total Cache.

Remove useless plugins

Regularly check your plug-in containers and delete useless and redundant ones. Too many plug-ins on the same page will load unnecessary CSS and JavaScript files which will bog down your loading time. If you have done a few cleaning tasks on your hard drive to make it perform faster, the same ideal applies to WordPress sites as well. It is not enough to de-activate the plug-ins you do not use, you should delete them altogether because even though they are de-activated they still take up allot of needed space. Provide enough space only for necessary plug-ins.

Compress images and video files

Did you know that large image files and video files can cause your pages to lag. WordPress has a wonderful feature that allows you to ‘thumbnail’ your photos, so you can save space and your pages will load much faster. Also try compressing video and image files and reduce it to kilobytes instead of megabytes.

Change themes

Sometimes, the problem is not found on your end but on the themes’ end. There are themes that are loaded down with large graphics and tons of code so you may want to try choosing a minimalist type of theme. You may not get an eye-candy blog but you would surely get a user-friendly blog. Besides, users nowadays are after the content and not the design and if it is taking to long for your site to load they will go elsewhere.

Change hosts

If you have optimized the quality of media and image files and done all that you read above and your site still moves slower than molasses, then check with your hosting provider. Sometimes the hosting itself is the culprit. Consider migrating to a more reliable web hosting provider that can provide more options for your loading problem.

Compress and combine CSS and JS

For more advanced users, combining and then compressing the cascading style sheet and Javascript would make a difference in terms of speed. WordPress also has plug-ins that will do this work for you. You can also find Javascript compression tools on the web to help you carry out the job perfectly.

Even if you are not an WordPress expert or a web developer, you can spot defects on your blog and find simple solutions at the same time. There are tons of self help files available on the internet. Having a WordPress site makes troubleshooting easier because thousands of plug-ins are available to address your specific needs.

Check out our previous articles:

• WordPress Secrets that Enterprise CMS Vendors Don’t Want you to Know
• Do You Have Enough Bandwidth on Your WordPress Host?
• Free WordPress Themes Released in Summer 2012
• How To Add Google Analytics to WordPress Multisite
• Increase Social Media Traffic – 7 Free WordPress Plugins

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SEO Tips for WordPress

Optimizing titles

WordPress, by default, puts the blog title before the title of the entry or post. This may not be favorable if you want to place higher in search engine rankings. An effective strategy to optimize your WordPress site is to put your blog post title first before anything else.

There are advantages to doing so. First, most search engines like blogs where titles of posts come first. Such an order enables them to put importance to keywords that are usually present in titles. Second, an optimized and descriptive title is a significant aspect of page search engine optimization. Titles enable search engines and readers to determine the content of the page before they visit the site.

Using meta descriptions

WordPress automatically generates meta descriptions for every blog using the system. However, you may want to make sure that your site will have effective keyword index for better SEO. To ensure higher search engine ranking, manually type a good description per post. Combine a keyword-rich title and matching description and see how the strategy boosts search traffic.

It is also a good idea to install and use a WordPress plugin specifically designed to enhance search engine optimization. One popular plug-in that comes highly recommended is “All In One SEO”. It is designed to create and post a matching description for each title and post. It also helps optimize your meta descriptions.

Describing post images

Use ‘alt’ and ‘title’ attributes when describing images or posting captions in your blog entries. Adding short descriptions of images using ideal keywords can bolster search engine traffic and ranking. It is a common mistake of many WordPress blog owners to neglect the use of such attributes when posting images.

When saving images, provide a simple and short name with dash in between every keyword. Thus, if you have a photo of a Ford Focus, the image file should be named as: Ford-focus.jpg. Underscore can be used to replace the dash (Ford_focus.jpg).

Use Permalinks

You need to be sure that you are using permalinks on your WordPress site. By default your WordPress software contains web URL’s which contain question marks and numbers inside of them. These links are hard for the search engine web crawlers to attach themselves to. As a result your site will not be indexed as fast as it would normally be. WordPress also, however, does offer you the opportunity to create custom URL’s for both your permalinks and archives. You will be able to find this option under your Administration panel. All you will have to do is to choose the options panel then click on permalinks.

Optimize Titles

In the permalinks section of your WordPress marketing software you have the option of date and name based. This option will place the year, month, date, and post title in your URL. For the SEO web crawlers it is best to have the site of your site appear in the front of this URL. So instead of using the basic URL you should choose the custom URL and create a link that has your site name appearing first.

Pay attention to tags

Tags are a great addition to your site on a SEO standpoint. They will enable the search engines web crawlers’ crawl through your site more easily and also it will allow you to create specific pages for your tags and keywords.

Page titles

You will need to make sure you have good titles on all of your webpages. Just as you put the site name at the beginning of your URL you will need to do the same thing with your page title.

Post titles

The post titles that you choose should be clearly written. Do not stuff these titles with keywords that you are using to target your site or blog. Choose your keywords carefully when you are posting and get those words in your post title.

Ping services

Each time you post or edit either a posting or a page your WordPress blog can notify a variety of different sites that you have updated your blog. It is very important that you use this step.

Google sitemaps

Google has a tool for you that are called Google Sitemaps. This tool will help you index your site and allows you to tell Google which pages are the most important.

Categories

Categories will help you organize your content. If you have your permalinks turned on, the category names will appear in your URL. This is why it is very important that you name your category names very carefully. Try and make sure that you use keywords to name your categories and do not be afraid to make loads of them. WordPress gives you the ability to use sub categories and sub-subcategories so make as many categories you can. This way you are able to down your focus on certain keyword phrases.

Creating a WordPress site that is SEO ready is fairly simple when you use the proper tools and follow a few simple rules. Using the steps we discussed in this issue can help you create a great SEO friendly site in no time.

Check out our previous articles:

• WordPress Secrets that Enterprise CMS Vendors Don’t Want you to Know
• Do You Have Enough Bandwidth on Your WordPress Host?
• Free WordPress Themes Released in Summer 2012
• How To Add Google Analytics to WordPress Multisite
• Increase Social Media Traffic – 7 Free WordPress Plugins

We hope you enjoyed this article! Please don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed or follow Inspirationfeed on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook! If you enjoyed the following article we humbly ask you to comment, and help us spread the word!

Quick & Dirty Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization works on principles like Keywords in domain, Keywords in title tags, and Keywords in h1 tags etc., Keywords are the rulers for the web page. Keyword density analyzer tool helps to find out whether the keyword is rich for the given content and appropriately whether is it placed in title tags, h1 tags etc., Moreover, domain name should be easily readable and understandable to know about the content of a site and if owns the same name as the content, more chances of ranking in the site.

Social Bookmarking Made Easy

Firefox is the best browser to view any website. Plugins in Firefox provide additional facility to make the social bookmarking easy. The Power of Only Wire is a free plugin and interestingly by a simple click, one can able to submit the site to nearly 30 social bookmarking sites namely Facebook,Twitter,Yahoo Bookmarks, Ask etc., Using those plugins will surely create more traffic.

Become a Top Commenter on Blogs

One needs to find a blog containing “Top Commentator” widget that gets installed. Identity is very much required for the blogs. One need to be the top commenters for those blogs and once it is given; they are rewarded with a link back to their own site. It is an interesting fact that once become top commenters for those blogs, in all the pages of the blogs, one can easily get backlinks that ultimately increase the traffic. Googling and one need to find the blogs that contain the top commentator widget

Social Bookmark the Blogs

A perfect way is to be the top commentators on a blog and get a backlinks. Then bookmark the sites using Only Wire plugin. Ultimately entire world will be under one’s leg as there are more chances of traffic to the sites.

Alternate Ideas

Best way to get noticed by the search engine is to make a BlogSpot blog or Squidoo lens. Be the top commentator on the sites like containing more page ranks and get more backlinks. Then submit the newly created blog or squidoo lens containing all the backlinks and submit to Only Wire. In this process search engines index the high page rank sites and get the backlinks from there and also the one created from new blog or squidoo lens.

Consider Outsourcing

Business promotion should be increased and in any stage it should not get disturbed. One can oversee the business by recruiting known persons for their business and help to improve the business. Outsourcing to genuine third party sites also sometimes help for it.

Conclusion

Rewarding backlinks will not be possible for poor comments. Hence reliable, energetic and trustworthy comments should be given for comment section. Blog owner has all the rights to delete the comments, ban the visitor. One’s ultimate aim is to get more backlinks. Search engine optimization knowledge should be the base to understand and win the backlinks. Patience is much required to sustain in the market.

Check out our previous articles:

• WordPress Secrets that Enterprise CMS Vendors Don’t Want you to Know
• Do You Have Enough Bandwidth on Your WordPress Host?
• Free WordPress Themes Released in Summer 2012
• How To Add Google Analytics to WordPress Multisite
• Increase Social Media Traffic – 7 Free WordPress Plugins

We hope you enjoyed this article! Please don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed or follow Inspirationfeed on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook! If you enjoyed the following article we humbly ask you to comment, and help us spread the word!