Intermediate

We have collated a list of themes and plugins to get you started. Best bit – these are all free! 🙂 We will move into paid options in the next section.

Top 3 Themes:

1. Responsive – A fantastic responsive (obviously) theme that is well-architected and not cumbersome. It is the highest ranked WordPress theme (in Freebies) and has been for almost 2 years. This one is from CyberChimps and has a simple (and very common) front page and minimalistic design with a call to action button on the front
2. Customizr – A great looking theme which can suit many styles of site. This has been a common starting theme for startups due to its ease of configuration out of the box. This one is from Themes & Co and I would see it a good “business-looking” website.
3. Hueman – for photo blogs and magazine style. From AlxMedia, this would suit those who are wanting to show off lots of images.

Pro Tip: Here is a great little site you can use to identify what theme other WordPress sites are using. Try it out on this site over here: Whatwpthemeisthat?

Pro Tip: Always think MOBILE FIRST! Luckily for most, WordPress itself and most themes have inbuilt capability to handle what is called Responsive design, which means the site, sizing, images, and layout all handle or respond to all device types and sizes. We will take a deeper look into Responsive design in the Advanced section, for now here is a little trick to check if your site will look good on any device: Resize your browser window!! That’s it, just use your mouse to resize the browser you have your site open on and shrink it right down and see that everything re-aligns itself. Simple as.

 

TOP 10 Plugins:

1. Akismet – most installations will come with this already. If you are going to allow comments, this is a must to stop spam.
2. Google Analytics for WordPress (by Yoast) – If you aren’t using Google Analytics on your site you are missing some of the most comprehensive and simple to set up site and visitor statistics around.
3. Jetpack – If you are just starting out and want the essential toolbox for WordPress, connecting your site to the WordPress.com servers by installing this and creating a login on WordPress.com will give you access to these great little “swiss-army-knife” style additions to your site:
   • Stats (usage statistics on pages and posts and across your site)
   • Sharing (social media integrations)
   • Contact Forms (adding integrated contact forms to your site)
   • and many more..
4. J-Shortcodes – Another beginner plugin for quick and easy setup of site asthetics like BOXES, TABS, ACCORDIANS, etc. Here is a sample of a jshortcode tab in action: Building it is so easy. Here is what the code looks like in the back end:
5. Mailchimp for WP – Super plugin if you are collecting email addresses (if you are using Mailchimp that is)
6. W3 Total Cache – Caching is  one of the easiest ways to speed up your site and a fast site will keep your visitors coming back and hanging around longer. There are several caching tools out there, but for ease of install and functions out of the box,  we like W3.
7. SumoMe – By the guys over at AppSumo.com (Noah Kagan: Genius) This plugin is another great addition to your arsenal for monitoring usage and “squeezing” email addresses from your visitors. It has a few features built in and they are constantly building out new great functionalities which you could use as you grow out your own site
8. Q2W3 Fixed Widget – It’s common practice to put some popular or important links in the sidebar widgets but it’s even better practice to make sure those are easier to find by ensuring they follow a reader down the page when they scroll. This simple little plugin makes them do just that – just like you see on your right if you are looking at this through a desktop/laptop browser –>
9. WordPress SEO – This one is by WordPress uber-legend Yoast, who does some great fundamental plugins that should be stock with any WordPress site. Use this to kick start your Search Engine Optimisation for your site. SEO is currently out of the scope of this course, for now consider this the first of many steps to good practice when it comes to people being able to find your site.
10. WP SES – Whether you are using AWS as your web server or not, you can still utilise Amazon Web Services, Simple Email Service (SES) to push out your mail from your website. This is a free plugin and a really cheap option as a mail server. This will also help ensure your sites emails don’t end up in peoples spam folder.

Bonus Plugins – If you are creating a membership site or want users to be able to login to your site then you might want to look at some of the additional features from these 3 plugins:

1. uber login logo – If you are going to have people log in to your site, you might want to change the login logo from the big WordPress W to your own. This is really simple with this plugin. Just select your image (less than 320px if you want to keep the whole image on the screen) and “add to post” – done.
2. Password Protected – Simple little plugin to put a password redirect on anybody (admin can be set too in config) accessing your site. Obviously you would only put this on while you are pre-launch when things are looking messy or not for public eyes
3. WP Custom admin bar – Another neat little plugin to remove that ugly black admin bar from the top of the screen when users are logged in. Pro Tip: If you are making changes to your site and want to flick between viewing and editing, use the Incognito Window function in Chrome (or similar in other browsers). This way you can be logged in as the admin user and also be viewing as a user.
4. S2Member – If you want to create member only areas on your site, secured downloads, etc then S2Member is a great feature-packed plguin that can integrate with paypal, buddypress, and Mailchimp. You can create membership levels and allow specific content to specific levels of user.

We will cover off more of S2Member in the Advanced section as this plugin becomes even more powerful when you move to some of the paid options.

Moving Over to WordPress

Betting back to the journey for a moment, you will recall the terrible company site we had made ourselves in a different platform. Well, moving it over wasn’t too hard and learning your way around the media uploader, resizing images, were all really simple and intuitive. The decision to move is still looking like a good one.

Using one of the themes mentioned above (Customizr) we ended up with this out of the box The circle effect on the images was part of the widgets and never got resolved. This is where I finally started to learn about the power of Widgets.

Widgets – part 2

In the first section we talked about Widgets, one of the best features of WordPress, one that some people (including me) overlook when first starting out. Once you have started using widgets, there are 2 key tweaks you can use to really get the most use out of them and ensure your site stands out from all the rest.

1. Fixed or “sticky” widgets: In the plugin list above we mention a great little plugin called “Q2W3 Fixed Widget”. This is a super simple, easy to use plugin that adds a checkbox to each widget in the Appearance-Widgets menu. This simple tweak will ensure your important widget content appears on the screen instead of wasting all that widget area to blank space when your visitors scroll down the page. It also helps the user with navigation or taking action by not having to scroll back up to find your widget. Brilliant.
2. Unique content on pages: One question we’ve been asked multiple times is how do you add unique content on widgets.  The quick and dirty way is to use a different layout to show or hide a particular widget, but this won’t get you very far if you want to have more than one or two unique changes. The best way to achieve this is to use “featured” content. In the Genesis Framework it looks like the above, depending on your theme it could be named different. Alternatively Jetpack has these options too. If you would like a specific page, or post to appear on a widget or even different content to appear like your latest posts, you can set up Categories and then select these categories to show in the featured widget.

 

Layouts

Layouts are like the page templates for your site.

 

Email Sign-Ups

Newsletters, memberships, visitor engagement, sales funnels; all that good stuff, all start with email sign-ups. We will get into details of this massive topic in the Advanced section, for now let’s get you started.

You will notice on the right side of this page (at the bottom if you are looking at this on a mobile device) that we have included a side-bar widget and on that widget we have a sign-up form. These are super simple to get started and just so powerful.

You will also see (again, not on mobile) that when you scroll down the widget stays on the screen – thank you Q2W3 plugin!

These forms come from the Mailchimp for WP plugin and are automatically integrated with the email service. Setting them up is super simple for any of the email services, here we will cover Mailchimp.

1. Sign up for Mailchimp and create a LIST
2. In the My Account section, click on EXTRAS and API KEYS
3. Copy your api key as you will need this to connect Mailchimp to your WordPress site
4. Install the plugin and activate
5. Go to the Mailchimp Settings option from the Mailchimp for WP menu in your admin section
6. Paste in your API key and click SAVE CHANGES. The status should then go green and say connected
7. Now you can select FORMS and you should see the list that you created earlier and Save Changes
8. Copy the shortcode (if you are using the free version, this is [ mc4wp_form ] into your page or your sidebar widget (or both!) and you will have a great looking form right off the bat.

Now you will be able to collect your visitors email addresses and send them automated responses.

White Screen Of Death!

Now that you are comfortable with adding plugins and changing your theme, you are probably adding things like crazy (I told you that you wouldn’t be able to help yourself) and I am willing to bet you have received this little doosey:

It’s called the white screen of death (WSOD) and is extremely common. Don’t panic – actually panic a little, your site it screwed; but don’t panic for more than a few seconds cos it usually won’t take more than that to fix it.

We will cover how to fix this in more detail in the Advanced section next. For now if you are having troubles check out this link or leave a comment below and we’ll point you in the right direction.

Site Slow? Too Many Plugins

One last thing before we move on, if you have been lucky enough to avoid the WSOD, you may not have escaped the wrath of the slooooow site. As mentioned above, this can be caused by any number of things, but you might find in your experiments with plugins that all of a sudden your site goes from really responsive (sub 3 second load times) to unuseable (10+ seconds). There will be more on this in the advanced section, including an epic fail I discovered on all my sites, but for now here is a great tip on working out why your site might be loading like something out of the 1990’s.

P3 Plugin Profiler (yeah, it’s a plugin!): I know installing another plugin to sort out plugin performance seems a little counter-intuitive, but the beauty of this is you can install it, diagnose and fix the problem, then just delete the plugin. It’s actually created by GoDaddy – go figure?

Basically, this will load up your site and keep a close eye on how your plugins are playing nicely (or not) with each other and your site. It produces a really informative and easy to read summary of which plugins are affecting your sites load times and you should be able to see which one is causing the problems. Here is a sample of a report on one of my network installs.

Before:

After:

5.3 seconds off every page load! 1/10th the database calls!

This is a great tool that will let you experiment with plugins with a bit more emphasis on performance.

 

How is your site coming along? Have you had the WSOD yet, hope not! Have you managed to integrate with an email management tool like Mailchimp? Let us know how you went and if you are having any issues or questions to move your site along.