The 25 Best WordPress Plugins for Small Business
Getting your small business website up and running opens a whole new world of possibility: online marketing and e-commerce. WordPress is a powerful tool that powers over 30 percent of websites currently online and has big names using its interface, including the New York Times, Disney and Mercedes-Benz. When you join the ranks of businesses and bloggers that trust their brand’s online presence to WordPress, you enter a world of opportunity. WordPress websites are incredibly versatile and customizable, primarily through bits of code called plugins. From helping you build an online shopping cart for customers to fill to giving tweetable tidbits of your blog posts with the push of a button, WordPress plugins transform the user experience when visitors come to your site. There are limitless ways that you can customize your site, but today we’re going to look at the 25 best WordPress plugins for small business. [text_with_frame id="368c1dbfefba91dceb946d322e0e86bc" content="‹¨›p‹˜›‹¨›em‹˜›If you find this article helpful consider giving it a share‹¯›nbsp;‹¨›/em‹˜›?‹¨›/p‹˜›" line_color="rgba(0,0,0,.07)" text_font="body" heading_font="heading" animation="none" animation_speed="2" animation_delay="0" __fw_editor_shortcodes_id="e6852c2dacc162bc8c34ba646905e841" _fw_coder="aggressive"][/text_with_frame] 1. Sumo.com One of the fastest ways to grow your audience is to build your subscriber list. But to build your subscriber list, you need ways to capture visitors’ email addresses. To do that, use the Sumo.com package of plugins, like their nifty email capture CTA popup that non-annoyingly pops across your screen and encourages visitors to enter their email addresses to stay in the loop. 2. Yoast SEO When you write a post or develop a page, the last thing you want is to put all that effort in and lose out on prime SEO rankings. Yoast SEO is a plugin that sits in your dashboard and monitors the SEO…
WordPress for Businesses
WordPress may have been released in 2003 as a blogging content management system (CMS) but it has grown up since. No longer is WordPress only for blogs. More than 60 million WordPress websites testify to its versatility. WordPress is helping businesses succeed including dog trainers, custom sign makers, branding agencies, and active gear retailers.Why is WordPress a good choice for a business website? Control and Ownership Control and ownership matter to business owners. Your products and services wouldn't be what they are without you. The same is true of your website. Large businesses may be able to afford a unique CMS (although even the BBC, Bloomberg, and Disney use WordPress) but small businesses usually opt for customizing a CMS already available. Most small businesses turn to WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or Weebly. Yet only one of these gives business owners robust control and ownership.WordPress is open source meaning that anyone can use it or modify it. You aren't beholden to the hosting solutions (and pricing tiers) of a single company. Choose virtually anyone to host your WordPress website and move it anytime. WordPress' open nature also means that it is easy for a developer to modify your website. You aren't stuck living within the walled garden of a single company. WordPress puts you in control.WordPress also takes your ownership of your data seriously. You own your business and you own your website. You should have complete control of your website's data. WordPress allows you to access (and export) your website's data anytime. So if you were ever to move your WordPress site (or leave WordPress behind) you can take your data with you. That isn't always true of other popular content…
Weebly vs WordPress
So you are thinking of building a website (or having one built for you). You've heard of popular software like Weebly and WordPress. You know that you want to make changes to your site on your own after it is launched. Which do you choose (if either)? Here we pit Weebly vs WordPress so you can make the most informed decision. Content Management Systems Both Weebly and WordPress are Content Management Systems (CMSs). A CMS gives website developers, owners, and admins the ability to build, write, modify, and extend web content. Using a CMS means that you may not need to write any code to modify a page, publish a blog post, add a product, or change simple settings. Both Weebly and WordPress do these things and more. Weebly Weebly is one of the most popular drag-and-drop DIY web builder services. It has grown by leaps and bounds since 2007. Their (mostly) intuitive builder, simple pricing tiers, and one-stop-shop model has propelled their growth. According to Weebly, their software now powers more than 40 million sites. Weebly is proprietary software and is tightly controlled by the company. WordPress WordPress is still the king of content management systems. It powers more than 60 million sites including 35% of the top 10k sites on the web. WordPress powers such sites as TechCrunch, The New Yorker, BBC America, Bloomberg Professional, The Official Star Wars Blog, Variety, Sony Music, and MTV News. WordPress is open-source. Anyone can view the code, contribute to the project, or build onto the software. Weebly vs WordPress Let's put these two in the ring and see who emerges the victor. Theming and Styles Both WordPress and Weebly support themes.…
Sweet Dreams 4 Kids Daycare
Sweet Dreams 4 Kids Daycare in Owings Mills Maryland is an established local daycare with an outstanding reputation. Angela Jones-Coleman has over two decades of childcare experience and has maintained close relationships with the families she serves. Until recently Sweet Dreams 4 Kids Daycare did not have a dedicated home on the Web. Like many local businesses, Sweet Dreams 4 Kids relied upon word of mouth to sustain their business. Yet, a dedicated website increases trust and reputation and may help the daycare sustain their business and be more competitive. We provided the daycare with a simple yet functional website that could be expanded modularly. Sweet Dreams 4 Kids wanted a simple one page website to keep web-development costs down. They wanted to start small with the hopes of growing the site in the future. We designed their site to grow with their business - whether they expand the site themselves through the WordPress admin panel or give us a call to add a feature or updated content. We designed the site from scratch using modern responsive design, bright fun colors, and simple yet interactive content. sweetdreams4kidsdaycare.com lists essential information, provides a means of contact, contains an interactive Google Map, and an interactive tool for sharing and viewing reviews. Rystedt Creative designed the first version of sweetdreams4kidsdaycare.com to grow with the daycare's needs. We may continue to work with Sweet Dreams 4 Kids Daycare to expand the site's contents as time goes on. We (or the daycare itself) may replace stock images with original images from the daycare and a slideshow or gallery, expand information, add a contact form and contact page, and a visual layout of the daycare. Rystedt…
How to Secure Your WordPress Website
Security is a hot topic in tech and WordPress is no exception. It seems that no one is safe from the risk of being hacked. Governments, banks, retailers, bloggers, and virtually everyone else has reported being hacked at some point. And these are just the successful hacks we are aware of. Perhaps you have already experienced the frustration of being a hacking victim. Most Americans have had payment info stolen or their email or social media accounts hacked. Don't let your WordPress site be next. Most hackers leverage simple and easily patchable vulnerabilities to hack into your site. Here are some simple ways you can make your WordPress website more secure today. Update Security patches are one of the primary reasons for updating software. Keeping your WordPress install and plugins up to date is one of the easiest ways to keep your website secure. By default WordPress automatically installs minor security updates. However, major updates are not installed automatically. You should be regularly checking your website and installing available WordPress and plugin updates. If you are letting those updates pile up you are probably missing some essential security patches. Let the developers behind this software keep you secure - install their updates. Use Strong Usernames and Passcodes Weak login credentials are to blame for most hacks. According to one study conducted by Verizon in 2016, “63% of confirmed data breaches involved leveraging weak, stolen or default passwords.” There are three ways to make your WordPress login more secure: 1) Use a Unique Username That is, don't use "admin". Many WordPress beginners install their site with "admin" as the admin's username. Hackers can leverage this to hack into your site because…
The Best Content Management System: WordPress
What do Tech Crunch, BBC America and the official Disney owned Star Wars Blog all have in common? Sure, they publish stuff you can read, they're well known and their owners make money but there is something else... WordPress All of these sites are powered by WordPress. As are sites owned by Sony, Bloomberg, the New Yorker... and many, many more. WordPress Has Transformed the Web WordPress was released in 2003 and the Web hasn't looked back since. Now nearly 30% of the Web is powered by it. According to WordPress, there are 60 million active sites using their services. But by a rough calculation of the nearly 1 billion websites online, that number could easily be much higher. What is WordPress? WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS) and functions as the backend of a website. It does the heavy lifting - like the primary database functionality, user accounts, post scheduling, email subscriptions, admin panels and more. It is also open source and customizable. Some companies customize their WordPress installs to fit their needs more specifically rather than build a CMS from the ground up (and they save a lot of money). Yet most website owners don't need a custom CMS - they need a custom website. That's where companies like Rystedt Creative Services comes in. Individuals, freelancers, and creative firms (like us) use WordPress as the digital foundation for custom designed and developed websites. WordPress allows creative web professionals to spend their time focusing on what the client really needs on the front-end (a beautiful, adaptive and functional search engine ready website) while letting WordPress do the heavy lifting on the backend. Sure, we install professional plugins and…