How long does it take for your website to load? Does it get hung up on loading large images? If so, have I got a tip for you!

kraken.io

Kraken has an online image optimizer – and to make things even easier for you, it offers both Chrome and Firefox extensions, so you can simply click a button when you’re on your webpage and it will look at all of the images on the page and optimize them. (You have to do each page of your website separately, though.)

After the files have been optimized, you can download them all in a .zip archive and it will keep directory structure if you click the option for it to do so – which makes it easy to find and replace the images that needed slimming down on your website! (See image below for an example. Bonus points if the person who’s files those are recognizes their files.)

On average sampling, I’ve found sites to be able to save between 10% on up to even 25% file size by Kraken’ them!

Come a little closer, I promise not to bite. I’m going to let you in on a really big secret.

If you haven’t noticed – the hot trend for website design has been using unique fonts for a sometimes stunning effect.

Traditional graphic designers have been rejoicing breaking away from the standard boring set of web fonts and SEO experts have simultaneously been rejoicing the breaking away from the use of Flash (swf) or pixelated images to show stylized text.

Font integration for the web has come a long way. So much so, that you can now integrate a ton of fonts into your existing WordPress site quite simply and FREE! Although there are a lot of ways to integrate fonts into a WordPress driven website, the following is by far my favorite.

Introducing Google Fonts

Currently, there are 293 Google Fonts and the collection is growing. Feel free to take a look:
http://www.google.com/webfonts

How do we get them on our WordPress site?

Through a plugin of course!

While you’re signed in to the back end of your site, search for, install and activate a plugin with the name “Fontific“. Here is Fontific’s page on WordPress.org, if you want to take a gander or install it manually:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/fontific/

Once the plugin is activated, a “Fonts” menu option will appear under “Appearance”. Click there to begin building your font rules, and become the mad scientist we all know you are! Mwahahaha!

Click here to view the embedded video.

A tip to get you started:

Headings

To apply your font rule to a particular type of heading – say for the largest heading, simply type “h1″ (no quotes) where it says “Enter selector here”. Then select a font, font size, color and so on.

Click to view larger.

Headings go from h1 all the way to h6 – and search engines LOVE when you use headings effectively on your web pages.

Advanced

Font styling doesn’t have to stop at just headings. You can apply font rules to any bit of text on your site. If you’re more advanced, you can “Inspect Element” to view the code and find out what label has been applied to each element, which will allow you to be very specific with your styling.

If you see <p id=”superimportantstyling”> you would use a “#” (pound sign) in the font selector box before the name, like this: #superimportantstyling

On the other hand, if you see <p class=”superimportantstyling”> you would use a “.” (period) in the font selector box before the name, like this: .superimportantstyling

# = id
. = class

Have fun & let me know if I can be of assistance along the way.

It’s very easy to “set it and forget it”. Take a few moments to ensure your site is backed up and have the security to know you’re covered, should anything happen.*

The “too long; didn’t read” version

Install, activate and set up these 2 plugins to completely back up your site:

• Snapshot Backup
• WP DB-Backup

Click to view larger.

Nuts and bolts

Your WordPress site is created and served dynamically, so there are a couple things to consider to have 100% backup coverage.

What is your site is comprised of?

Your site – even if it only has 5 pages, is composed of more files than you may initially expect. What really makes up your site?

1. The database. The MySql database which stores all of your page text as well as directions to images and other file links you created within your site.

2. The open source software files that make up WordPress. We don’t normally see the files that make up a piece of software, but because WordPress is open source, all of the files that make it work are uncompressed and easily visible. Of biggest customization (and therefore importance to back up) is the “wp-content” folder, which houses any themes and plugins you’ve installed as well as any images or other files you may have added to your site along the way. This is where the magic happens!

A developer will be familiar with this view of the WordPress application files (see image above).

Back it up, as easy as 1, 2 . . . that’s IT!

In an effort to keep things simple, I’ve found a couple plugins that take care of backing your site up in just 2 easy steps. Both plugins offer automatic backup.

(If you need a refresher on how to install and activate a plugin, here is a video.)

1. The “WordPress Database Backup” plugin backs up the database. To manually back up your database, go to the “Backup DB” menu option and click “Back Up”. However, if you would like to have it automatically back up once a week, those settings are found under “DB Options”. Here, you can specify to receive a back up copy of the database in your email.

Note: I noticed a slight glitch in that automation didn’t seem to take effect until you select gzip “yes”.

WP DB-Backup Plugin on WordPress.org

2. The “Snapshot Backup” plugin backs up all of your WordPress files. This plugin backs up all of the files and folders you see in the first image I shared in this post. Once this plugin is installed and activated, click on the menu item “Snapshot Backup” to find simple instructions to use the plugin.

You may manually create a compressed file which you can immediately download to your desktop by clicking “Create New Snapshot”. However, if you take a moment to set up the FTP information you can set your site on a backup schedule and you won’t even have to think about it again!

Snapshot Backup Plugin on WordPress.org

For more technically minded folks

Here’s a link to more detailed backup information on WordPress.org. I found it to be very interesting and informative.

WordPress General Backup Information

* If you don’t have time or inclination to set your site to back up, I am available for hire. I would estimate an hour maximum for installation, activation and automation set up. In some cases, time would be less, and I would only charge for the time I spent. It is my interest to share what I know with you, and if you have the time and interest to do it yourself, that’s awesome!

Please share your conquests! It excites me to know I’ve been helpful – and it will inspire future tips!

Although many themes allow you to manually build your site menus by going to “Appearance” -> “Menus”, with bigger sites you may prefer to have the site navigation dynamically built. (Less upkeep in the long run.) In this case, is there an easy way to exclude some specific pages from appearing in your site navigation?

Absolutely!

“Exclude Pages from Navigation”, a Plugin

Simply search for and load this handy little WordPress plug-in. It allows you to very easily exclude pages from appearing within the menu of your site. Once installed and activated an option will appear below the “Publish” and “Page Attributes” areas to the right. It will look like this:

To make the page hidden, simply uncheck the box & publish/save your page!

*Please note that this plug-in works for pages but not for posts.

Pro Tip

If you also don’t want the page to be indexed and found on a search engine, be sure to load the “WordPress SEO” plugin I mentioned back in August and tag the page with “NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”.

Enjoy your new powers!

How does a client select an avatar on WordPress, and get rid of that Mystery Man default?

Have you noticed some people have images associated with their blog and site comments? Not only are their comments more likely to be considered real and less likely to be spam, they’re more likely to be read and responded to, as well.

Here’s a little secret – they don’t need to be signed in to any particular website to take advantage of and use their own image.

You, too can have an image associated with your comments on any site – across the world.

The secret is to create a “globally recognized avatar” (or “gravatar” for short).

To set up a gravatar for yourself, go to this website: gravatar.com

Set up will take less than 5 minutes. Create an account using an email you’re likely to use when sharing comments on the internet. Upload a photo and voila you have your very own gravatar! When you type your email address in a website comment form that recognizes gravatars, your image will automatically be served from the gravatar.com website.

Pro-Tips:

1. You may wish to use a different email address than the one you use for personal or business use. Unless my comment is specific to my trade, I tend to use a “spam catcher” email address, associated with Yahoo or Gmail when leaving comments on websites.
2. You can add more than one email addresses to your gravatar account and associate different – or the same – image with each email address. My “spam catcher” address shows a different image of me than my business and personal email address.

Enjoy! I look forward to seeing your new gravatar!

YouTube is great, because you can visually see someone go through the steps to do what you need and you can pause the video to mimic the steps on your own site.

This is my first line of defense with any questions I have about software & also how I learned WordPress.

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Of course, I’m here to answer your questions if you need me. Sharing knowledge and empowering you is my passion!

If you have any WordPress related questions that aren’t time sensitive, feel free to [email]email me[/email]. I may feature them in an upcoming Weekly WordPress Tip & your question will be answered for free!

~ Enjoy your weekend ~

The sign-in area can be accessed using the following traditional formula: http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/ If that doesn't work, contact your web host.

Type in your email address (or username, if you know it) and a new password will be emailed to you. Once you sign in using the username and new password, you can update the password to something easy for you to remember by going to your profile page.

You can quickly get to your profile by clicking your name up in the top right of the dashboard interface, and scrolling to the bottom of the profile page to change the password to something easier to remember than that crazy password it assigned you “$&^&*_)4y$&^$!@(“.

[smile]

At this point, I would suggest you sign out of your site, then in again so you can allow your username and password to be saved by your browser for future reference/retrieval.

In Firefox, you have the additional security feature of a central password to access all your net passwords, if God forbid, your computer were accessed by a stranger. Be sure to quit out of Firefox when you are done with it to lock the passwords back up again, though!

This allows you complete control as to how your site looks to a search engine… or whether a search engine even sees that particular page.

Pro-Tip

If you don’t want your “Thank you for making a purchase” page to be found by search engines (or any other page, for that matter) you can use WordPress SEO to turn off search engines accessIbility to that page by setting it to:

NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW

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Do you have another idea I haven’t listed? Feel free to email me.

I’ve created a 5 minute video on how to install and use this particular plugin.

View Instructional Video

“Why would I want to use a contact form?”

Offering a contact form on your website instead of simply a email address will help reduce unwanted spam.

For the slightly advanced

You can have your website respond to your visitor instantly. Check out and set-up “Autoresponders”. These give clients an extra a feeling of being taken care of in a quick fashion, without you even having to be there!

Get creative!

You can create any number of web forms for your website and they’re not just for the “Contact Us” page.

Want to poll your visitors and add a bit of fun? Create an opinion poll!

Would you like to ask your visitors how you can make your products or your site better for them?Create a suggestion form!

Would you like to collect customer “testimonials”? Create a “Like our Products/Services?” form and ask visitors how they feel about your products or services. Be sure to ask their permission so you may display their submission on your site in future!

Want to allow people inquire on pricing instead of listing it directly on your website? Set up an “Inquire about pricing” form and have an autoresponder with common and current pricing as well as any additional contact information in case they need more information.

Do you have another idea I haven’t listed?

I’d love to hear about it! Hehe – I keep saying I’ll keep these short but it’s so fun sharing! Enjoy! ~ Jean

I choose to only show Youtube and Vimeo buttons. (the services I use.)

After loading and activating the plugin, you will find it adds some buttons above where you type your page content. There are about a dozen supported video hosting sites this plugin supports. You can choose which buttons to view by going to the “Settings” menu and then selecting “Video Quicktags”. You can turn the buttons on or off with a simple checking or un-checking of a button.

Semi-advanced tip:

While you’re in the preference panel, you can also set the default size of all videos that appear on your website as well as other features such as border color and video proportions.

Good luck and have fun!