WordPress Tips, Resources, Tools, and Plugin Reviews

If you own a self-hosted WordPress website, it is imperative that you stay up to date on with all the latest on WordPress  from security releases and updates, to recommended plugins and ideas on how to leverage WordPress in new ways.

Below you’ll find information about WordPress, reviews of and recommendations on plugins, tools, resources, step-by-step how-to articles and tutorials, and more  all from a company you can trust to deliver the important information you need, without the typical marketing hype and fluff, in a way that is clear and easy to understand.

WordPress Web Design: Four New Genesis WordPress Sites Live

Sacramento WordPress Website Design

With business events, entrepreneurial conferences, software conferences, our local Sacramento WordPress Meetup group, and a few WordCamps, Brian and I have been traveling a lot the past few months. Then when you throw in all our normal client work, and running our own business, things get a little crazy and the hours behind our computers get a little long.

Luckily we LOVE what we do — and we LOVE the Internet.

In the past four weeks, we have taken four different Genesis WordPress sites live — Cool right?! Here they are:

WordPress Web Design Examples

Genesis SEO Settings Guide

WordPress Genesis SEO GuideAt Bourn Creative, we build our custom designed WordPress websites exclusively on the Genesis Framework by StudioPress.

The reasons behind our choice to develop our custom themes on the Genesis Framework are numerous, but a few we often highlight are that the Genesis Framework is very flexible/customizable, coded extremely well, and has been built with SEO as a priority (SEO — the art and science of being found online through organic search).

After all, a beautifully designed website means nothing if consumers and search engines can’t find you.

Genesis already has most SEO requirements built into the framework. As a result, a separate WordPress SEO plugin isn’t necessary, which means one less plugin to manage, and keep updated.

Get Our Genesis SEO Settings Guide & Instructions

Adding Google Authorship To Your WordPress Site

(AKA: Getting Your Photo To Show Up In The Google Search Results)

Google Search Results Page Showing Author Photo

Facial recognition is a powerful marketing tool and authors, business owners, and bloggers alike are taking advantage of it.

When searching Google, you have more than likely noticed that photos are now appearing next to some of the listed search results on the search engine results pages — and you may have even been influenced by those photos when deciding which link to click.

Getting YOUR Photo to Show Up

Adding your photo to Google’s search results can easily be accomplished in a few different ways with a WordPress site. In fact, the process is nearly identical using three of our favorite WordPress tools:

Learn How to get your photo to show up next to your pages and posts in the Google search results

3 Steps to Turn Your WordPress Site Into a Lead Generating Machine

Last week Brian and I both gave lightning talks at the Sacramento WordPress Meetup. Brian’s talk shared the 5 must have plugins we recommend for every WordPress website.

My talk covered how to turn your website visitors into clients and customers — more specifically I talked about website strategy and three steps you can take to turn your website into a lead generating machine.

How to Make Your Website a Lead Generating Machine:

Creating a complete small business website takes comprehensive strategic planning of the content and user flow, the user experience, the sales funnel, the design, the navigation menus, the page templates, and more. Usually my website strategy presentation is an hour long, but for the Sacramento WordPress meetup, I was limited to only 10 minutes!

These are the three website strategies I shared in my talk — the strategies I think are most important for a website owner to understand:

  • STRATEGY 1: Use the Know, Like, Trust, Conversion approach to naturally lead your visitors to take action
  • STRATEGY 2: Create multiple opportunities for visitors to find your key money content
  • STRATEGY 3: Eliminate all unnecessary distractions from your sales funnel and conversion pages

Now, let’s dive deeper into each of these three strategies:

Learn Three Website Strategies to Turn Visitors Into Clients & Customers

5 Must Have WordPress Plugins We Use On Every Site

At Bourn Creative we have a stable of various paid and free WordPress plugins that we regularly use on our clients’ sites, depending on needed website functionality.

Out of our collection of trusted WordPress plugins, there are five must have plugins that we use on pretty much every custom WordPress site we build — and this past week I shared these five plugins in a lighting talk I gave at the Sacramento WordPress Meetup.

WordPress Plugin #1: Akismet

Akismet WordPress Spam Blocking

Why We Recommend the Akismet WordPress Plugin:

  • Created, managed, and owned by Automattic
  • Save time with simple comment spam protection
  • Low monthly fee (still free for personal bloggers)
  • Download Akismet

Learn Our 5 Must Have WordPress Plugins

A Behind the Scenes Look at a WordPress Website Makeover

Today's Innovative Woman Magazine WordPress Website MakeoverRecently we launched a brand new custom WordPress website for Today’s Innovative Woman, and wanted to share some of the behind the scenes strategy for the site and insight into why we built it the way we did.

At Bourn Creative we view the primary role of design as problem solving. While the visual look and feel is important, it must first and foremost support the overall site strategy.

Today’s Innovative Woman is a magazine for women entrepreneurs and business owners with print distribution of more than 10,000, visibility at events around the country, and a strong online community.

While the original WordPress theme worked great when the magazine was first launched, Today’s Innovative Woman was was quickly outgrowing the site. With a booming community, growing subscriber base, and influx of guest writers and featured experts, not only did publisher Cathy Alessandra need a new custom WordPress site, but she needed a whole new online strategy!

Read More About The Redesign For Today’s Innovative Woman

WordPress 3.5 “Elvin” Released

WordPress 3.5 was just released and the biggest change that most WordPress website owners will notice is the dramatically changed media center. The media uploader has been completely rebuilt and now makes many tasks much simpler, including creating and managing new galleries.

Here’s a video overview from the WordPress.org blog highlighting 3.5:

wordpress-elvin-video

Learn More

PressNomics Review & Awesome Stats About WordPress

PressNomics | The Economics of WordPress

Last week I was in sunny Chandler, Arizona (just outside Phoenix) for the first annual PressNomics event; the economics of the WordPress ecosystem.

The event sessions were amazing and even better was the caliber of the attendees. There were all types of WordPress and technology professionals in attendance from around the world including freelance designers & developers, enterprise level web development agencies, hosting companies, commercial theme and plugin shops, representatives from Automattic including the founder Matt Mullenweg, tech startup founders, and many more.

Learn More About PressNomics

What Your “WordPress Consultant” Isn’t Telling You (About WordPress)

Lies Your WordPress Consultant Is Telling You And Why You Shouldn't Listen to ThemSo I’ve got a pet peeve, and I’ll admit, that may not be a big surprise if you’re a regular reader of our blog!

I get irritated when people who need help turn to consultants — supposed experts — for help and are misled or fed incorrect or outdated information simply because the consultant doesn’t know the answer and they don’t want to admit it.

This drives me especially CRAZY in the WordPress world. Lies, myths, untruths, and false information about WordPress is being fed to business owners left and right — and it’s perpetuating false beliefs.

Let me explain. I LOVE WordPress. All of our sites are built for WordPress and I love the fact that it allows our clients to have total control over their websites. But this ability comes at a price.

Now anyone can open a hosting account, install a theme, and plop in a custom header can call themselves a WordPress web designer or WordPress consultant. There are even some calling themselves WordPress developers that can’t even read PHP!

Why? Because WordPress is a “Hot Topic” for entrepreneurs who want to start online businesses. And for some “Hot Topics” mean easy and fast cash.

Read More Truths and Lies About WordPress — And Get a List of BIG sites using WordPress