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ClickWP’s blog on mastering and getting the most out of your WordPress site

3 Easy Options for Presenting Portfolios in WordPress

Art Gallery

Showing off your work or press mentions on a WordPress website turns out to be a challenging task. The task is even more difficult if you want to show off more than just images. In this article, I present 3 easy options to display portfolios. And I even made an example site to demonstrate the 3 methods explained here.

First, let’s take a look at the kinds of content that you may want to showcase on your website:

Images are the most common type of portfolio content to show off photos, artwork, drawings and infographics.

Videos are great for videographers or if you were featured in a video interview.

Links to external sites – if you were interviewed or contributed an article to a high profile website, a link accompanied by a short excerpt or screenshot is a great way to present that content.

Documents – Essays, news clippings, stuff in PDF format; or presentations and slide decks are also portfolio-worthy

Article – Sometimes the best way to present your work is by telling a story through a case study or blog post. With this format you can combine the different kinds of content above for a rich and engaging portfolio entry.

You can find examples of most of the content types above on our WordPress Portfolio Example Site. Now let’s examine the 3 easy options for displaying portfolios in WordPress. [Read more…]

How WordPress impacted my life and business

WordPress 10th Anniversary LogoTen years ago in early 2003, the self-publishing revolution was taking off but the tools available were rudimentary and lacking. At the time, a freshman at the University of Houston named Matt Mullenweg was worried that the software he used for his blog was at a dead end and mulled the idea of branching it into a new blogging software. The idea was greeted positively and on May 27, 2003 WordPress was released to the world.

This Monday marks the 10th anniversary of WordPress. It’s strange to think that this piece of software has influenced a big part of life and business for myself and countless other people around the world. WordPress today is now in use by 52 out of the top 100 blogs on the internet and it is estimated that one of every 6 websites on the internet is powered by WordPress.

WordPress has enabled a whole generation of independent publishers (bloggers) who make their living online. WordPress has also allowed small businesses to expand beyond traditional bricks and mortar business models to online learning, digital products or simply conducting their entire business virtually. [Read more…]

WordPress 3.5 “Elvin”: New features we love

The WordPress development team has been super hard at work and have released version 3.5 of the WordPress software, nicknamed Elvin. We have been playing with the preview versions for a while and think it’s a superb upgrade. Here are our favorite features.

New Media Manager

Uploading images, organize and re-ordering them, and adding images into your post has been streamlined in the brand new Media manager. It’s also much easier to add a gallery of images with the image picker.

The brand new Media Manager
The brand new Media Manager

The Media library is completely different and may take some getting used to, but it’s a welcome upgrade. Since it’s such a big change, you may want to watch our bite-sized knowledge base videos on Adding Photos and Images and Using the Media Library.

Our videos require a ClickWP account (sign up for free!) and have all been updated for WordPress 3.5.

[Read more…]

Image Widget by Modern Tribe displays images, banners in the sidebar easily

The Image Widget by ModernTribe

Update Aug 2013: Lots of visitors to this post are interested in using this plugin to display ads. If you fall into this category, I highly recommend this article on WPBeginner: The Best Ad Management Plugins and Solutions for WordPress.

The Image Widget by Modern Tribe is a simple yet versatile widget that has earned a place in our WordPress Toolkit. It’s primary function is to display an image in sidebars or widget areas but you can also use it to display banner ads, or as an ‘About me’ widget. With some out-of-the-box thinking you could probably even use it for more! [Read more…]

WordPress SEO by Yoast: Rank better and improve your content too

ClickWP recommends WordPress SEO by Yoast because we think it is the best SEO plugin for WordPress

The best SEO plugin for WordPress is undoubtedly the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast. It’s earned a firm place in our WordPress Toolkit and we wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone.

How does this plugin earn such high praise among all the competition? We explain our reasons in this article.

WordPress SEO by Yoast features

Despite it’s name, the WordPress SEO plugin does much more than search engine optimization. It’s bread and butter is SEO, but you can also use this plugin to optimize for Facebook, Twitter and RSS too for an integrated approach to getting your site found.

WordPress SEO can do the following and more for you:

  • Control how your site’s pages appear in SERPs with page title and meta description templates for posts, pages, custom post types and taxonomies.
  • Control the title, description and image that appears on Facebook and Google+ when your content is shared on those sites.
  • Help search engines determine the structure of a site more easily with advanced control over internal links or breadcrumbs.
  • Ensures your content is fully indexed by listing them out in a XML sitemap. You can even include and exclude post types and taxonomies from your sitemap.
  • Control the canonical URL, 301 redirect and meta robots on your content.
  • Makes your content more findable by helping you improve your content with SEO page analysis tools.

Let’s take a closer look at that last bullet point. WordPress SEO will even help improve your content to make it more findable online. To explain how the plugin does this, we made a 5-minute video to show you how to use the page analysis tools in the plugin. [Read more…]

Stop WordPress spam in 2 minutes on your WordPress blog

Credit: Randy Glasbergen

Unfortunately, spam is an inevitable part of life. We get it in our email every day, and as website administrators and bloggers, we get it in the form of spam comments. Comment spam is created by spambots who crawl the internet looking for forms that they can dump their spam payload and move on to the next.

Spam comments are easy to spot after a while.

1. They have a generic message that doesn’t make any reference to the content in your blog post or page.

2. Instead of names, these ‘commenters’ identify themselves with keywords like ‘online dating’, ‘cheap viagra’ or ‘louis vuitton handbags’.

3. The content of their comment contains links to shopping websites, pharmaceutical websites and other pages that are totally irrelevant to your blog post.

Click for full sized image

[Read more…]

Top 3 Most Useful Features in WordPress 3.4 You’ll Love

WordPress 3.4 was released yesterday and as usual there are a whole bunch of new features added to it. Many are developer features that you may not use directly, but there are some great new features for end users. Here are our favorite three.

Easy Twitter Embeds

Finally! An easy way to embed Tweets on your site. Just paste a tweet URL on its own line and WordPress will automatically embed it.

Pasting this on a line of its own…

http://twitter.com/ClickWP/status/213092284793749504

..automatically turns into this

The embedded tweet includes action links that allow readers to reply to, retweet, and favorite the tweet without leaving your site. Neat huh?

FYI you can use this technique to embed videos and images from popular websites too. [Read more…]

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

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. [Read more…]

PEMANDU Business Circles (ETP Blog) theme development

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.

[Read more…]

True story: How website clutter can get your site hacked

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. [Read more…]

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