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Welcome to WordPress! Essential configuration and first steps after installing WordPress

April 3, 2012 · Comments { 0 }

Welcome to WordPress!

WordPress displays a helpful welcome message when you first login after installing a new WordPress site, but it’s a little too brief to be helpful to new users. We’re constantly teaching our friends about WordPress so we’ve put together a quickstart guide for new users with this article below!

Logging into WordPress

Let’s start right from the beginning — how do you login to WordPress? You can get to the Admin for any WordPress site by going to

sitename.com/wp-admin/

However, If WordPress isn’t installed in the root directory, you’ll need to adjust the path, e.g.

sitename.com/blog/wp-admin/

Tip: Bookmark the URL to save you from typing it every time you want to login to WordPress. Continue Reading →

Filed under: Optimization, WordPress Basics

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PEMANDU Business Circles (ETP Blog) theme development

March 29, 2012 · Comments { 0 }

The Business Circle by the Economic Transformation Programme

The Official ETP Blog is one of the media hubs of the Economic Transformation Programme. The blog is constantly evolving and adapting to the needs of the ETP communications team. Because of this, the ETP chose ClickWP as a partner whom they could turn to for advice on all aspects of running and maintaining a WordPress website.

Recently the ETP rebranded their blog to ‘The Business Circle’ and launched a makeover too. The design was created by Ximnet, a Malaysian digital agency who built and manages their main website. ClickWP took the design and converted it into a Genesis child theme. We chose to build the site on the Genesis theme framework for two main reasons:

1. We could rapidly develop the child theme by taking advantage of the built-in features of Genesis like breadcrumbs, threaded comments, and functions to create the grid posts and new theme options. These may be small features but they add up to development time.

2. Being a high profile site, we wanted to ensure that the theme was as secure as possible.

Continue Reading →

Filed under: Client Projects

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True story: How website clutter can get your site hacked

March 27, 2012 · Comments { 2 }

My personal blog got hacked last month. Ouch. Visitors who clicked a search result link to my site were getting redirected to some Russian site. Luckily I realized it pretty quickly and fixed it within 24 hours, but the damage had been done — I lost almost a day’s worth of traffic and some new visitors.

I did however, learn an important lesson from the experience — website clutter can get you hacked. Continue Reading →

Filed under: WordPress Tips

Cumi & Ciki Food and Travel Blog theme customization

March 14, 2012 · Comments { 0 }

The new and improved CumiDanCiki.com with customized theme

Cumi & Ciki Food and Travel Blog is a popular Malaysian blog by Mei (@agentcikay). The blog has gone through several incarnations and needed a makeover and loading time optimization. However like many bloggers, Mei didn’t have the budget for a full redesign, so she turned to ClickWP for advice.

We advised her to select a ready-made premium theme from StudioPress to save costs*. We then customized the theme to add on the top featured posts section. ClickWP also optimized her database and threw out a number of redundant plugins to reduce her server load and improve the blog’s loading time. Continue Reading →

Filed under: Client Projects

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ClickWP had a small part to play in the WordPress party at SXSW 2012

March 7, 2012 · Comments { 4 }

I’m proud to have played a small part in securing a venue for the WordPress party at SXSW 2012. Jane Wells tells the story on the WordPress blog:

Once upon a time, David Wang had a business called Buzzmedia in Malaysia, with the twitter username @buzzmedia. When David changed gears and started ClickWP, a WordPress support business, he stopped going by the Buzzmedia name. In the U.S., a company also called Buzzmedia wished it had that Twitter username, and asked if they could have it since David wasn’t going to use it anymore.

David, feeling the WordPress community love, said he would give them the name, and suggested they do something in return for the WordPress Foundation. So, everyone talked to everyone else and it worked out that Buzzmedia was willing to donate a fantastic venue for this year’s party as well as covering the bar.

In the end, the Foundation got a great SXSW party, Buzzmedia got their twitter username, and David got the warm glow of having used his power for the good of the WordPress community, and they all lived happily ever after.

I’m glad that everyone lived happily ever after, though I do wish I could attend the party and SXSW in person. If you’re traveling to SXSW and hanging out at this awesome party, could you send me a tshirt? Have fun guys!

Filed under: Site News

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Introducing the Premium WordPress Toolkit for ClickAssist customers

January 29, 2012 · Comments { 0 }

Over $1000 of premium WordPress themes and plugins available for free to ClickAssist support plan customers.

We’re very excited to announce our Premium WordPress Toolkit, and we think it’s something you’ll love as well.

ClickWP has many premium WordPress themes and plugins in our toolkit. Because we own developer licenses for them, we are able to use them on customers sites. That means you are able to make use of the themes and plugins in our toolkit, without having to purchase a license for them yourself.

Today we are introducing a formal program for you to access our toolkit for your own site. Let us know which theme or plugin you’d like to use on your site by creating a ticket in the Client Area. We will then install it for you. Continue Reading →

Filed under: Site News

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We’ve got your back with our new WordPress support plans (with 20% launch discount)

January 9, 2012 · Comments { 0 }

ClickWP introduces professional WordPress support plans for bloggers, small businesses and web publishers, simplifying the chore of running and maintaining a WordPress website without paying high hourly fees.

Managing a website is hard work. It’s even harder when you’ve got to run a business, deal with customers and do the laundry all at the same time. And why does adding something new in WordPress always seem so hard?

Or maybe you have a blog. You love writing it, your audience is growing but gosh if you could only figure out how to add a newsletter opt-in, or tweak the header design it would be perfect.

You may also need help with lots of small details that doesn’t warrant hiring an expensive designer. So you try to figure it out through Google, support forums and tutorials… and end up wasting hours of time.

Sound familiar? These are the reasons why ClickWP is launching our new WordPress support plans.

Our goal is to provide first class support from people who truly understand WordPress at affordable rates for bloggers and small business owners. In other words, we want to make sure we’ve got your back whenever you need us. Continue Reading →

Filed under: Site News

WordPress is more than blogging software: How we built our Client Area with WordPress

January 9, 2012 · Comments { 1 }

WordPress has evolved from its roots as a blogging tool into a powerful platform that can build almost any kind of site imaginable. It’s powerful, but it’s also more accessible than many people think and you can build pretty complex sites without needing to be a hardcore developer.

Case in point – our new ClickWP Client Area. I built it over the last 2–3 weeks and was pleasantly surprised at how little actual coding I had to do.

Client Area Features

Client Area Dashboard

Client Area Dashboard

Add a Ticket

Add a Ticket

Watch Tickets

Watch Tickets

Agent Dashboard

Agent Dashboard

Agent Tickets

Agent Tickets

Organized communication

Organized communication

Knowledgebase

Knowledgebase

Client Area Dashboard thumbnailAdd a Ticket thumbnailWatch Tickets thumbnailAgent Dashboard thumbnailAgent Tickets thumbnailOrganized communication thumbnail
Knowledgebase thumbnail

Continue Reading →

Filed under: Creating with WordPress, Site News

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Top new features in WordPress 3.3 to improve your web publishing workflow

December 9, 2011 · Comments { 2 }

A new version of WordPress is heading our way in a few weeks (or days)! WordPress 3.3 is now in the release candidate stage, meaning that all features are fully baked and is just going through some final checks to make sure everything works on launch day. I’ve been playing with the beta versions on ClickWP for some time now, and have found it to have increased my productivity. Here’s a quick overview of how WordPress 3.3 is going to improve your web publishing workflow.

Less Clutter, More Focus

The admin screens have been updated in WordPress 3.3, with a focus on streamlining the layout and reducing clutter. The first thing you’ll probably notice are the new Pointers, a new feature that is being introduced in this version.

Pointers function to highlight and explain new changes, like the redesigned Dashboard. Plugin authors can also take advantage of this feature to quickly walk you through important details and changes.

The next thing you’ll notice is the new Toolbar, which is a consolidation of the Admin bar and old header. Hovering over the toolbar items will reveal submenus, when available, for quick access.

Like the new Toolbar, the redesigned navigation also helps to reduce clutter by making use of flyout menus.

I took a day or two to adjust to having menus fly out whenever I moved my mouse over the left side of the screen, but now I love it because it hides all the additional submenus and reduces visual clutter in the admin screens. Continue Reading →

Filed under: Workflow

Quick and Easy WordPress Caching with W3 Total Cache

November 28, 2011 · Comments { 0 }

In our last article we gave you an introduction to caching is and how it could benefit your WordPress site. In this follow up article, we’ll show you how to optimize and speed up your WordPress site in just a few clicks using the W3 Total Cache plugin.

The W3 Total Cache plugin, or W3TC, is a powerful caching plugin used by top sites like Mashable, Smashing Magazine and MakeUseOf.com. W3TC can help your site pages load quicker, help withstand traffic spikes and provides loads more features. Best of all, W3TC is free.

To measure the performance increase when using W3TC, let’s start by performing a Page Speed Test at https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/. Here are the results of The ClickStarter before we activated W3TC.

Before Caching — 71/100

Let’s see if we can do better with W3TC. Continue Reading →

Filed under: Optimization

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