WordPress is one of the most powerful and flexible tools out there for bloggers. When you choose to use WordPress, you have at your fingertips a vast array of features you can use to customize your blog. To learn more about these options, you should read the advice in the following article.
Make your theme current on your website to draw more traffic. Switch to a new theme that accentuates your colors and logos. Also, you may want to opt for a more professioanl theme if you are planning on showing your site off to a high volume of potential customers each day.
Remember to make your sidebar as concise and clean as possible. You don’t want it to be full of 100 links, ads and buttons. Instead, only put what is important in your sidebar and, if you need more links, put them into submenus which appear when the user mouses over your main menu.
Create a posting schedule. You will increase your motivation if you know exactly how long it’s been since your last post. As a matter of fact, you can create your posts ahead of time and then use the WP scheduling feature to post them at specific times.
You must make adjustments if you do not want your posts to show up in the order published. First you must modify the date, then you can rearrange the list. Upon opening one of the posts, you can view the date in the right-hand top corner. Click right onto the date, make changes and then make sure you save your post so that the position is altered.
If you want to create a line break, but not a paragraph break, hold shift while you press the enter key. This moves the cursor down to the next line without including any blank space. If you want to put a letterhead-type address on your page, this should make it a snap.
You can insert media into your posts just by pasting the URL where you’d like the media to appear. For example, paste in a YouTube video just by putting the URL within the text where you want the video to play. Be sure that the URL doesn’t turn blue – if it does, highlight it and click the unlink button.
As you begin getting comments on your posts, consider allowing people to post with an avatar. It helps your site feel like more of a community, and it only takes a minute to do. Simply go to the settings area of your dashboard and then click on “discussion.” You should see the option there to enable avatars.
When you are choosing a WordPress template to use, pick something that gets frequent updates. You do not want to use a template whose creator has abandoned updates because sometimes you have to address security issues. A creator who is proactive in updating his template will give you a better product.
When looking for a template, look for one that has the basic layout and design that you desire for your site. This way, you would not have to customize it too much in order to give it the look that you want. This will cut down on your site development time.
When you upload images into the media gallery, try to keep the image file sizes down. Large image files take much longer to upload. When you use an image like that in your website, it will delay the load time of your page. This may discourage your visitors to stay and browse.
If you find that writing new posts is cluttered and confusing because of all the stuff on your page, clean it up! Use the Screen Options link to choose what shows up on the composition page and what remains hidden. Many of your plugins may add content you don’t want, so remove it there.
Sticky the posts the you want to stay at the top of your page. If there are posts you want your visitors to see first, sticky them by going to the ‘visibility’ option on the ‘edit posts’ screen. Choose to sticky the selected messages to the first page, and that is it.
Make sure your WordPress site has a great theme. A theme can actually make or break or your site when it comes to attracting or repelling visitors. There are many great free themes out there. You can also find affordable premium themes. Just make sure your themes don’t have a ton of messy code that makes loading too slow or that isn’t compatible with WordPress’s current versions.
Join an online forum full of WordPress users. This way you can brainstorm ideas and get suggestions for your site. People are going to be happy to help you avoid their own WordPress mistakes. Just do a little reading to get some information, and you’ll find that a good forum is better than buying a lot of books.
You need to make sure that your WordPress blog has some security installed. There are times when your blog may be vulnerable due to technical issues. Hackers love exploiting these weaknesses and wreaking havoc on your site. You can use plugins to prevent this. There are also plugins that can back up your data should anything happen to your site.
Make sure your site can be found by the search engines! Otherwise, you are not going to generate the type of traffic you were hoping for. Go to the Settings area of WordPress and look for “Reading.”� Then, ensure that there is no check mark next to the statement, “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.”
Make use of your footer area. In WordPress, this section near the bottom of the page can keep your visitors engaged. You can add ownership and copyright information or links to other pages. In some premium themes, you can extend these sections to provide items like biographies and other relevant information to your cause or site.
Getting started with WordPress is not difficult. The program is easy to use, and anyone can start blogging in a few minutes. However, some of the program’s more powerful features may take some more time to learn. Use the advice that you have read in this article to get the most out of WordPress.
