Tag Archives: Wordpress

Tweaking your WordPress Theme (Part 2)

Posted by on May 20, 2013 No comments

In today’s post, we will be sharing another three tips on tweaking your WordPress theme

Page Navigation

Many themes display all of your pages across the top of your site. But let’s say you’d like to exclude a page from the main navigation. Here’s one way you can do it:

Look for the following code (usually in the header.php file):

<?php wp_list_pages(); ?>

Change it to this:

<?php wp_list_pages(‘exclude=4’); ?>

This will tell WordPress to list all your pages except for the page with ID 4. You can change this number to whichever Page ID you’d like to exclude.

If you want to exclude more than one page, simply separate all the page IDs with a comma, like this:

<?php wp_list_pages(‘exclude=4,5,7,10’); ?>

For more information on WP list pages: http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_list_pages

Add Something (Anything) to the End of Every Blog Post

Maybe you want to add a link to subscribe to your newsletter, an advertisement, etc. To the end of every blog post. Here’s how you do it:

The file you need to edit is the single.php. This is the template that displays your single articles. Open the file and find a good spot for the content you want to add. For example, to add a “Subscribe to newsletter” link after your post (and before the comments):

<?php the_content(); ?>

[the “subscribe to newsletter” link]

<?php comments_template(); ?>

Changing the Header Image

Websites are often judged by their looks and the first impression comes from the header – it is the first thing that your visitors see.

Your theme’s header is specified in the header.php and the style.css files. In the header.php file, you may see:

<div id=”header”>

<div id=”headerimg”>

<h1>

<a href=”<?php echo get_option(‘home’); ?>”>

</h1>

<div class=”description”>

<?php bloginfo(‘description’); ?>

</div>

</div>

</div>

And in the styles.css file, you may see:

#header {

background: url(“<?php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’); ?>/images/header.jpg”>

no-repeat bottom center; }

#headerimg {

margin: 10px 8px 0;

height: 192px;

width: 740px; }

To change the image file, replace the “header.jpg” with the name of the new image file you have uploaded to replace it. If it is in a different directory, replace the bloginfo() tag with the address of the image’s location.

If you are using an image that is the same size, then simply replace the image. But if the image is a different size, change the height and width in the #headerimg section.

For more information: http://codex.wordpress.org/Designing_Headers

Tweaking your WordPress Theme (Part 1)

Posted by on May 6, 2013 No comments

WordPress is one of the most popular CMS platforms in today’s web design industry, largely because of the vast selection of available themes, free and commercial. But most often a theme is only a starting point – there is no such thing as a perfect theme – many website owners start with a great theme and tweak it to perfectly suit their needs.

Tweaking is not a privilege of those proficient in scripting or programming. There are many “customizations” you can make to your WordPress theme, even if your scripting/design knowledge and experience is limited.

Here are some of the easy customizations you can make to your WordPress theme.

  1. Edit the theme’s CSS
  2. Display post excerpts or full content
  3. Excluding/including a category
  4. Crafting page navigation
  5. Add something (anything) to the end of your blog posts
  6. Change the header image (if theme has a header image)
  7. Change the sidebar
  8. Add contact form
  9. Add Google Analytics tracking code

We will be discussing the first 3 customizations in this post.

Edit Theme CSS

You can tweak colors, fonts, layouts, backgrounds and other visual elements by editing the Cascade Stylesheet, or CSS. Most of the time, you will find the theme’s CSS style in the file style.css. You can access this file via Appearance > Editor in your WordPress admin panel.

How to:

  1. Locate the attribute you want to edit. The attributes are identified by names indicating sections, such as body, header, etc.
  2. Make the changes to the code displayed between the curly brackets { }.
  3. Save the changes

For more information: http://codex.wordpress.org/CSS

Display Post Excerpts or Full Content

By default, your theme will display the full content of your blog posts on your home page. But if you would rather display only a short excerpt from the post as a little “teaser” to click through to the full article, you can tweak your theme to display excerpts.

To do this, you will need to get familiar with two tags:

1) The tag that displays your full post content is <?php the_content(); ?>

2) The tag that displays your post excerpt is <?php the_excerpt(); ?>

All you need to do is replace the content tag with the excerpt tag on your index.php file. Then, when you write a new post, enter in your article summary (or teaser) in the Excerpt field.

*Note* If no excerpt is set, it will automatically display the first few sentences of your blog post.

For more information on excerpts: http://codex.wordpress.org/Excerpt and http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/the_excerpt

Excluding/Including a Category

Let’s say you want to display posts from only one category on your homepage, or you want to exclude posts from one or more categories. Here’s how you do it:

Add this code where you want the posts to be displayed:

<?php query_posts(‘cat=3’); ?>

This code will display posts only from category ID 3. Change this number to whichever category ID you’d like to include.

If you want to do the opposite, all you need to do is add a “-“ in front of the category ID number, like this:

<?php query_posts(‘cat=-3’); ?>

This will exclude all posts which have the category ID 3.

For more information on query posts: http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/query_posts

7 Common WordPress Mistakes (Solutions Provided)

Posted by on April 18, 2013 No comments

7_common_wp_mistakes

We all make mistakes. But, learning from our mistakes makes the lesson meaningful.

Below are 7 common mistakes that WordPress users often make. By outlining them, we hope this list can help prevent other WordPress users from running into the same problems in the future.

1. All about “username”

There are mainly 2 types of popular mistakes under this category and let’s go over each of them in detail. The first common one we see is: clients using “admin” as username. Recently, WordPress has been attacked by a massive botnet of tens of thousands of computers and the attack was mainly targeting websites with “admin” as the usernames. “Admin” is the most common username that people choose to create. It would make sense for hackers to attack the websites with “easy-to-hack” usernames first.

Solution: don’t use “admin” as your username when you install WordPress. However, if you’ve already used it, check out this article to see how you can change the WordPress username (by default, WordPress does not allow users to change their usernames).

Also, you have the option of inserting your first name and last name when creating an account for your WordPress login.  If you manually insert a name for your account, all your posts will no longer display your username as the author of the posts. Instead, it will display your first name and last name (Note: you are NOT required to insert a GENIUNE first and last name!). Differentiating your username from your “account display name” decreases the chances of hackers successfully guessing your login-name.

Another common mistake in regards to WordPress username is keeping the unused user account. For example, if you hire a contract webmaster to take care of your WordPress website, you should always remove the account once the service ends. Remember, the more user account you have on your site, the greater chance the hackers can access to your website.

Solution: if you don’t need an account, delete it right away.

2. All about “password”

Did you know that the most common passwords are actually “password”, “123456”, and “12345678”? Compiled by a password management company, these results were gathered using the data that hackers have previously posted online.

So, imagine you have a username “admin” with a password “password”, what is the level of difficulty for hackers to attack your website?

Solution: Create a stronger password (e.g. contains at least a letter, a number, and a symbol). Also, regularly update the password!

3. Never backing up your website

Myth: “Why should I back up my own site? Doesn’t my web hosting service provider backup my website anyways?”

Answer: Yes, we do backups of your website, but the backups are mainly for our benefits. All the backup files we make (e.g. in one particular server) are jumbled together. Also, when we perform our backups, it may not be the moment you make changes to your websites. So, chances are, we may not include the latest changes of your website.

Solution: Log in to cPanel and do a full backup of your website regularly. If you don’t know how, read this blog post.

4. Too many categories

The architecture and planning of a website greatly affect its SEO performance. Moreover, leaving excessive categories will slow down your website load time.

Solution: One of the greatest features of WordPress is the capability of using “tags”. “Tag” is very similar to category and it helps WordPress owners to group posts based on the keywords they manually set. So, try to limit the usage of categories and make use of tags to group different posts.

5. Ignoring WordPress and plugin updates

WordPress regularly releases updates for security reasons. If you ignore them, you would probably know the consequences right? The same problem goes to plugins too. Remember this: there are reasons why plugin developers release updates. So when you see the update signs, give them a click immediately!

Solution: Besides regularly logging in to your WordPress Dashboard to see if there are any updates available for download, you may consider using Softaculous to install WordPress. The benefit of using Softaculous to install WordPress is that it will send out email notifications for users when there are new updates release for the installed scripts. For full details, check out our article in our Scripts Library.

6. All about plugins

Speaking of plugins, one of the most common mistakes a WordPress user makes is: missing out the great features of certain plugins. For example, you have a photo WordPress website and you often experience slow load time. You never have the time to investigate the reason behind it. In fact, your high quality images slow down the website. To solve this problem, you can simply install a caching plugin as well as other tools that can help you reduce the file sizes of your website while keeping the quality of the images. To learn more how these plugins help you increase the load time of your WordPress website, check out this article.

While many WordPress users miss out the great features of plugins, on the contrary, there are other WordPress users who like keeping the unused plugin files on the website. Remember: the more files you have on your website, the longer time it takes to load your website. It makes sense to store the files on your website if you are actively using them. But for those that are not in use, why not remove these unnecessary plugins and have a faster website load time?

7. Unfriendly Permalink Structure

By default, WordPress has this setting for permalink:

/?p=123

If you see a blog post with this URL (e.g. YourWordPressBlog.com/?p=123), can you guess what this post is about? If you can’t tell what this blog post is about, your readers (including search engine robots) will have the same experience too.

Solution: login to your WordPress Dashboard. Go to “Settings” and click “Permalinks”. There are 6 settings for you to choose and you can decide which one that fits your need the most.

We hope this article gives you an opportunity to review some of the settings on your WordPress website as well rectify any mistakes. If you need help in solving the problems, our Customer Support Team is happy to assist you. Simply contact us by our live chat, telephone, or customer support ticket system.

Why should you install your scripts through Softaculous?

Posted by on April 10, 2013 No comments

At Doteasy, we often recommend clients installing scripts through Softaculous. Softaculous is an auto-installer with a library of hundreds of scripts for customers to install. With over 25 categories featuring over 250 scripts such as blog, CMS, forums, etc., you can create your website for almost any functionality you want. To learn the full features of Softaculous in details, please read this article in our Scripts Library.

There are many reasons why you should install your scripts using Softaculous. We’ve highlighted a few:

Ease of use

Softaculous Dashboard features an app-icon-driven interface which provides better navigation experiences (see the image below). Once you click the icon, you can choose to read the user reviews for that particular script, or check out the demo site built with the particular script. The demo websites also give you admin access so that you can view the website in both end-users and admin point of views.

dashboard

Quick Installation and Uninstallation

Typically, this is how you need to install a script without a script auto-installer: find the installation file online first; download the file and unzip it; upload it through FTP program; and manually create a database if it’s required. However, with script auto-installer like Softaculous, all you need is to login to cPanel and give Softaculous-icon a click. Then, navigate within the dashboard and choose the script you want. Click the icon and you are all set to go. No FTP uploading or manual database installation required! With Softaculous, the installation steps can be done within a minute.

What if the script you’ve installed does not quite suite your needs? No worries! There is an icon called “All Installations” in the Softaculous dashboard. Click on it and hit the remove button. The script and the corresponding database files will be removed instantly.

Softaculous is designed to simplify the sophisticated script installation process which creates a “Smartphone-App-Installation” experience to novice webmasters!

installations

All about Updates

One of the biggest drawbacks of using script auto-installer is that the installed scripts are often outdated. On the other hand, Softaculous manages to keep the scripts in their latest versions. Once there are new updates released for your installed scripts, you will receive email notifications from Softaculous. Plus, if you sign in to the cPanel and Softaculous dashboard, you will see the update icons on these two places as well. This feature is extremely handy for those who have installed multiple scripts on their websites while keeping all these scripts in the most recent versions.

If you would like to try out some of the great features of Softaculous, please visit our Softaculous Demo site.

Softaculous is included with our Unlimited Hosting plan. For those of you who are interested in subscribing to our Unlimited Hosting plan, please click here to sign up. Or, if you need further assistance, shoot us an email or submit a support ticket by visiting our Contact Us page.

Making a website with WordPress

Posted by on February 26, 2013 No comments

We often recommend novice clients to use WordPress to build their websites because it is easy-to-use, fully customizable, and NO coding knowledge required to set up the site. However, few clients may feel a little bit frustrated when they get to the customization part. While it does take some time for beginners to get familiarized with the navigation of WordPress dashboard, the steps, in fact, are not as difficult as you think. To better demonstrate this, we’ve made a few video tutorial series on how to build different kinds of WordPress websites, with no skipped steps. Let’s take a look at the screenshots of these websites first.

A Photography Website:

doteasy_demo_photo

A Business Website:

fb_feb_26

An Event Website:

doteasy event wp demo

(more to come in the future)

If you like the designs of these websites, definitely check out our “Making a website with WordPress” video playlist on our YouTube channel. These videos contain all the info you need to build these sites, including the download page for the themes, plugins, etc.

We hope you find the instructions of our video easy to follow. Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel in order to receive the latest updates of our new video releases.