The latest and greatest version of the WordPress software — 3.3, named “Sonny” in honor of the great jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt — is immediately available for download or update inside your WordPress dashboard.
Take a look at this intro video that covers some of the great new features.
You can also read the full blog here: http://wordpress.org/news/2011/12/sonny/
When given the choice, we prefer to build our clients web sites using WordPress. It’s an extremely powerful content management system supported by an enormous ecosystem of designers and developers. While WordPress gives us a solid foundation right out of the box, there are necessary key features that must be added to really deliver the best possible web site to our clients. Fortunately, WordPress is extremely extensible and most of the key features that are lacking can be achieved by using one of the more than 17,000 WordPress Plugins currently available as of this posting.
While I am a huge proponent of Plugins and use a wide variety of them to build specials features and functionality into our sites, I prefer to limit the number of Plugins used to the smallest possible number. This allows me easily stay on top of updates and prevent possible conflicts between Plugins that are developed by several different publishers.
Several years ago I began searching for ways to improve the usability and performance of WordPress without having to install multiple 3rd party plugins. That’s when I discovered and began using the Thesis framework. Although it made huge improvements to WordPress and simplified many of the tasks necessary for most of the sites we build, I continued my search for a better solution. A few summers ago, while browsing through Chris Brogran’s blog, I cam across a post explaining why he moved his site to the Genesis Framework. He had previously used the same framework that I was using, but decided to change for some very compelling reasons. I browsed on over to Studiopress and was quickly sold. [Read more...]
There are many reasons why visitors will leave your website quickly. It could be because the content didn’t meet their expectations. Perhaps the overall design is flawed. Or people might be finding it too difficult to navigate. Even if your site has a good design and is well maintained, there is always room for improvement regarding your website’s bounce rates.
Using Analytics Software
Apart from Google, there are numerous online companies offering analytics software to help improve your online business. By tracking the bounce rates of different pages throughout your website, you can discover where the weaknesses are and where you need to make the necessary improvements. Obviously, the software can’t solve all your problems, but by analyzing the various results, at least you know where to begin to improve your website’s bounce rates. [Read more...]
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the use of keywords go hand in hand. Website developers tend to focus on the inclusion of keywords in their page content and sometimes forget that there are other issues that need to be considered. Search engines look at all content on a web page and not just the text when considering page ranking. They also consider features and characteristics of the web page that website developers sometimes ignore. The following tips highlight some of these features and attempts to balance the search engine optimization process to include a wider range of page and website features.
The size of web pages on a site and the amount of page content provided is an important aspect of SEO. Search engines make the assumption that a website that has meaningful content will have web pages with a substantial amount of good content. A website will not be considered an authority on a topic if it has only a small volume of content. There have been examples of research where additional content, such as a piece of Shakespearean prose, has been added to a page and the page has jumped in the search engine rankings, simply because of the increased volume of text. The effect may be difficult to isolate to this one element, however the principle does also meet the ‘common sense’ test. [Read more...]