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5 Tricks to Better Manage Downloadable Files on Your Website

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It’s common for brands to offer downloadable content for users on their sites, either as a supplement to their existing content, or as a special offer in exchange for personal information (or in some cases, money). In any case, if you want your downloadable assets to be easily available, well-presented, and unobtrusive, there are a handful of best practices you’ll need to follow.

Type of Files to Offer

There are many types of downloadable files that have the potential to improve your user experience and brand image simultaneously. For example, tax-related businesses like E-File offer PDFs of common IRS forms necessary to file your taxes. Content marketing agencies like Curata offer templates, such as editorial calendars that you can fill out. Even major consulting companies like PricewaterhouseCoopers offer their industry reports as downloadable PDFs. [Read more…]

Why Web Development Skills are Becoming as Important as Online Content

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hands-coffee-cup-apple

There’s an interesting trend right now in online activities. Ever since the Internet came into its own, people have constantly declared that content is king.

But more and more, the web development framework around the content is playing a vital role as well. In fact, at some point, how well the web development is executed may come to mean more than the content. In other words, we have nearly achieved “the medium is the message” status on the web.

What does that mean to you as a web developer or content generator? The answer lies in the notion of a blog itself, inside premium WordPress plugins, and bundled up with the essence of new SEO methods.

We must also take into account the degree of specialization that some of this knowledge requires. That means you have to work in teams with people who have different skill sets from yours. This is forcing developers and generators to — gasp! — learn to communicate better.

Begin with the Idea of a Blog

When you’re setting out to create a blog, what mental steps do you go through? You have an idea, and you convert it to text, perhaps with some images inserted, and then post it.

But then what? How and where do you share it? Through social media channels? By individual messages to people? Through a subscription list?

Every question you ask about how to spread of the message relates directly to the concepts of web development. As a content generator, you have to know how to set of a framework of sharing and publicizing, or your idea will go exactly nowhere.

The simple blogging skill set is no longer enough for even a mild level of success.

Check Out Premium Plugins

Further into the idea of web development, consider how much you can accomplish with free tools associated with the WordPress blog format. It’s amazing, really.

You can have a full-featured presence without spending any money. But … if you want to tweak the format; if you want to express yourself more professionally, more succinctly, in a more streamlined way; then that’s where further web development skills are going to come into play.
Because buying plugin licenses and learning to use them effectively is your fast track to standing out visually and technically.

Think About the Importance of SEO

To be a successful content generator of any sort, you now have to know the web development aspects of SEO. You can’t write the way you used to.

Certain stylistic changes are now required, both in terms of raw content and understanding how to put together headlines, titles, subheadings, and image captions.

Teamwork Becomes More Integral

Another thing you’ll quickly realize is that you can’t create a successful online presence on your own anymore. There’s a good chance you’ll need a graphic designer, a photographer, a web developer, a social media guru …  all of these positions are necessary!

And though any person can double or triple up on these tasks, it’s nearly impossible to do them all yourself. Get a team, or get left in the digital dust.

Communication Skills Become More Important

Accompanying that team effort is going to come some communication frustration. Especially when you try to mix the creative and the technical together, serious cultural and language barriers exist.

A web designer won’t likely understand the drive of a blogger to use poetic words and phrases any more than a fiction writer understands why tiny adjustments in color scheme can any difference at all. But together, web development and content generation will create the perfect marriage of skills for online success.

 

17 Miscellaneous WordPress Plug-ins for 2011

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Time to revise those WordPress plug-ins. WordPress is still the most common used publishing system by experts an amateurs alike. Which means also the most targeted by hackers, spam, bots, etc. I compiled a list of new and older, still popular and useful plug-ins for you to try out.

Some plug-ings have been around since last year and this is the first time I come across them. Goes to show how much option there is for WordPress that one can still be surprised by what there is available plug-in wise.

[Read more…]

WordPress Backup Options

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With all the security breaches, hacking and DDoS happening this past year it’s 100% clear that no matter how small your WordPress site, it needs to be backed-up. A lot of people rely on their hosting company to guarantee the safety of their website, but unless they are at fault you are the sole responsible one for your website data.

The best practice is to always keep a recent back-up on your local disk and on an online storage that is not the same as your website. There are several WordPress plug-ins that make it easy to backup your files and database into a zip file which can be emailed to you or uploaded through FTP to a server.

Most plug-ins also support popular online storage such as Dropbox and Amazon S3. If you rather not do the heavy work yourself I listed two premium online backup services that are easy and reliable to use. Especially VaultPress has garnered a lot of attention and recommendation.

Get started with one of these options right away and sleep tight knowing your website is safe!

BackWPup

WordPress Back Up

* Database Backup
* WordPress XML Export
* Optimize Database
* Check\Repair Database
* File Backup
* Backups in zip,tar,tar.gz,tar.bz2 format
* Store backup to Folder
* Store backup to FTP Server
* Store backup to Amazon S3
* Store backup to RackSpaceCloud
* Send Log/Backup by eMail

wp Time Machine

WordPress Back Up

The wp Time Machine plug-in creates an archive (as a .zip file or .tar.gz file) of all your WordPress Data & Files which is ‘sent’ to a remote storage provider. You provide the remote account; this plug-in provides a connection to the offsite facility you choose. Current choices include Dropbox, Amazon’s S3, and FTP accounts.

WP-DB-Backup

WordPress Back Up

WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.

Bei Fen – WordPress Backup Plug-in

WordPress Back Up

You can create backups of your complete WordPress installation, only the files, or only your WordPress database.

DBC Backup

WordPress Back Up

DBC Backup, is a simple way to schedule daily database backups using the wp cron system. You can select when and where your backup will be generated. If your server has support you can select between three different compression formats: none, Gzip and Bzip2. The plugin will try to auto create the export directory, the .htaccess and an empty index.html file to protect your backups.

WordPress EZ Backup

WordPress Back Up

WordPress EZ Backup is a administrators plug-in to allow the easiest most feature rich method for creating backup archives of your entire site (not just WP installations but any part of your site or webspace) & allows backup archives of any MySQL database you choose & more.

WP-DBManager

WordPress Back Up

Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

WP S3 Backups

WordPress Back Up

Using this plug-in, you can easily and automatically backup important parts of your WordPress install to Amazon S3.

WordPress Backup

WordPress Back Up

Backup the upload directory (images), current theme directory, and plug-ins directory to a zip file. Zip files optionally sent to email.

Online Back Up Services

VaultPress

WordPress Back Up

VaultPress enables the retrieval of files right from the dashboard. Archived versions of your plug-ins, database, uploads, and themes are all available for download on the backup page with one click. And if you ever need help, the VaultPress Safe­keepers are ready to pro­vide hands on concierge service.

blogVault

WordPress Back Up

blogVault creates a backup of your blog. It backs up all aspects of your blog including full posts, comments, pages, images, plug-ins, themes and stylesheets.

The Best WordPress Slideshow and Gallery Plug-ins

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Even though WordPress has its own build in gallery function it isn’t very fancy. Unless you have good coding skills to modify the gallery your best option is a gallery or slideshow plug-in. The nicest plug-ins are build with jQuery making them very slick and dynamic.

A couple of the galleries even support more formats than just photos, like flash files, video’s and audio. I listed ten of the best galleries in my opinion. Most of the plug-ins are full of features and some with basic features that still provide more then WordPress own build in gallery.

Lightview

WordPress Gallery Slideshow

Lightview was built to change the way you overlay content on a website.

  • Clean: Designed to compliment your content.
  • Fast: Smart image preloading.
  • Easy: Customizable without having to know CSS.
  • Rounded: Adjustable rounded corners, no PNG images required.
  • Smart: Content resizes to always fit on your screen.
  • Slideshow: One button slideshow.
  • Works on all modern browsers.

Shadowbox

WordPress Gallery Slideshow

Shadowbox is an online media viewing application that supports all of the web’s most popular media publishing formats. Shadowbox is written entirely in JavaScript and CSS and is highly customizable. Using Shadowbox, website authors can display a wide assortment of media in all major browsers without navigating users away from the linking page.

Fancybox

WordPress Gallery Slideshow

FancyBox is a tool for displaying images, html content and multi-media in a Mac-style “lightbox” that floats overtop of web page.

Featured Content Gallery

WordPress Gallery Slideshow

Featured Content Gallery is a WordPress plugin by iePlexus that creates an automated rotating image gallery of your posts or pages for use anywhere within your theme.

Sponsors Slideshow Widget

WordPress Gallery Slideshow

This plug-in is designed to be used as sponsors slide show widget. It can display a certain link category as slide show in the sidebar.

Flickr + Highslide

WordPress Gallery Slideshow

Features

  • 13 unique ways of displaying your photos
  • 8 different gallery styles
  • Displays photos from a photo-set
  • Displays all of a user’s photos
  • Displays photos in latest or random order
  • Ability to change the size of images and thumbnails
  • Ability to separate photos into pages
  • Displays photo titles

Flash Photo Gallery

WordPress Gallery Slideshow

A WordPress plug-in which creates a Flash Photo Gallery like one provided in Adobe Photoshop CS2 Flash Web Photo Gallery templates.

Fotobook

WordPress Gallery Slideshow

Fotobook is a WordPress plugin that will link to your Facebook account and import all of your photo albums into a page on your WordPress installation. It makes use of Facebook’s API so importing your photos is a breeze.

Photo Galleria

WordPress Gallery Slideshow

Photo Galleria is a simple, yet elegant, plug-in for photographers and designers who want to beautify and simplify their WordPress photo galleries. The Photo Galleria plug-in filters the default WordPress gallery shortcode and replaces it with an elegant jQuery-powered gallery.

Dynamic Content Gallery

WordPress Gallery Slideshow

This plug-in creates a dynamic gallery of images for latest and/or featured content using either the JonDesign SmoothGallery script for mootools, or a custom jQuery script.

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