It doesn’t matter whether you have a business website or a blog – at one time or another you find yourself in need of quality images or photos. It seems like there are dozens of stock photo websites now where you can buy images for $1-10 – with istockphoto being (probably) the most expensive. There actually are places where you can find free quality stock images and photos for download – you just have to know where to look.

http://sxc.hu/

The stock.xchng website is probably the most well known place to get free stock photos. To download photos you have to signup for an account, and you have to watch the licenses. Some are free for personal use only. Also nearly every page of results has istockphoto results above and below the free images – as long as you pay attention to what’s free (and what’s not) you’ll be find. The nice thing about this site is that there are lots of very high-res pics for download at no cost at all.

http://www.dreamstime.com/free-images_pg1

Dreamstime sells stock photos, but if you know where to look – they do have a free images section. You have to signup for a free account to get them, but they are free, and there are lots of images

http://stockvault.net/

Stockvault is a great place to find free images if you are using them for non-commercial use (like a blog or personal presentation). This is another website where you have to pay attention to what photos are free and which are ads for pay stock image sites (as the results can be intermingled).

http://morguefile.com/

Morguefile does require and account, but there are more than 10,000 free stock images that are royalty free. This website is a big better than some of the others because the free photos are a big distraction free and it’s much easier to distinguish the free images from the paid ads and results.

http://www.freepixels.com/

Freepixels is a smaller site with a few ads, but the images they do have are easy to navigate and download (with an account). There are aout 40 categories of images, mainly organized in abstract, architecture, nature, objects, food and drinks, travel, and people.

http://www.photogen.com/

Photogen is another smaller site we like because while it does have ads, the image results are actually all free (and not intermingled with paid results). It’s easy to navigate and easy to download high quality images (with an account).

http://www.freeimages.co.uk/

Free Images is another website you should place at the top of your search list because not only do the have 6,000+ images – but you can view, access, and download them hassle free without an account. Searches are lightning fast, the ads are clearly marked in the sidebar, and the images are easily accessible by organized categories.

http://www.textureking.com/

Texture King is a unique site because they have free “stock textures” images. If you’re looking for an overlay, background, backdrop, etc., these are some great images! Another great (nearly ad free) site that does not require an account at all to view and download the images (which are high quality).

http://www.everystockphoto.com/

What makes Every Stock Photo unique is the fact that this site is actually a search engine for other free stock photo sites. It has results form stock.xchng, flickr, photoXpress, and more.

http://www.nationsillustrated.com/

Nations Illustrated has photos from all over the world with about 7,300 pictures (of varying quality). Most seem to be travel related, but you don’t need an account to access them, and about the only ad distraction you have to put up with is adsense.

http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/

Another term for free stock images is “PD” (public domain) and at the Public Domain Pictures website you’ll find all kinds of them. It’s fairly easy to tell the ads from the free pictures. Images are varying degrees of quality, but you can access and download them without an account.

Have you ever wanted to restrict access to a page or post, or create a members only website in WordPress? There are lots of great plugins out there that you hear people talking about all the time like Amember, S2 Member, Wishlist Member – some are premium (paid) some are free.

We ran into a situation recently where we wanted to restrict access to an entire website – all but a couple pages. We needed to do it quick, didn’t want to create any membership roles, and just wanted the solution “to work” out of the box.

Every now and then a plugin comes along that just fits the bill for a particular solution – and that’s what happened when we met WordPress Access Control.

All you have to do is install the plugin and click the most basic options:

In the image above (click for full view) all you have to do in general options is click “make blog members only”. You can redirect people to a custom login page if you want. Please note here as well that this plugin completely supports custom post types. You can choose do display pages and posts in menus (or not) as well.

Choose the default post state for both pages and posts and quickly choose who can access it (all or particular roles). You can setup specific foles, but it’s completely not required. The s2Member roles listed here are from another plugin we had installed.

Last you have options to show or not show results in search.

So once the plugin is installed in addition to the “default” out of the box options, you also have these options on the top right of every edit screen for pages and posts (above the publish box).

We need this plugin to create a development staging environment for WordPress to do some work for a client. We didn’t want the dev site to be publicly viewable or indexable by search engines, and in about 30 seconds with this plugin installed we had achieved that! Hopefully you find it just as easy to restrict access with the WordPress Access Control plugin.

I can remember a few years back when jQuery sliders and WordPress Featured Content Slider plugins were limited to a few broken versions in the official plugin repository – and the random free code you could copy and paste from the web. Now there are a LOT of great slider and featured content plugins in the plugin directory – in fact 192 of them just for the search term “slider“. Sometimes these are called gallery plugins, carousel plugins, featured articles, featured posts, featured slideshow, sticky widgets, and more. Also, some of these plugins integrate with HTML5, audio, video, Flash, jQuery, and more.

To make your life a little easier – we’ve already sorted through ALL of them, and I’m only going to show you ones that have about a 4 star review or above AND that have been updated at least in 2011, and that have 1,000 downloads or more. We also weeded out any ones that we tried and that didn’t work right, or had problems. We tried each one out in a dev test site running WordPress 3.2, but just check the plugin details (in the future) to see what it’s compatible with – and last time it was updated.

So without further ado, here we go – 13 Amazing featured content slider plugins for WordPress!

1. Featured Articles Lite

Featured Articles Lite has a 4 star rating and more than 10,000 downloads. The fact that it’s called a “Lite” plugin is ironic, since it’s a fancy Javascript slider (uses Mootools) with all kinds of cool features, and has options for light, dark, text, images, and even transparent overlay. This is what you would expect from a content image slider, the ability to add a graphic, heading, text, a “read-more” link, and some pagination back and forth through the items. Check out the screenshots of all the different versions>. It’s a fairly mature plugin, now at revision 2.3.7. Keep in mind that this slider plugin actually uses the content of existing posts or pages that you have published and “features” them in a slider carousel fashion.

Configuration: When you first run the plugin for the first time it asks you who to set what user roles have permission to use it like this:

You can just leave it as admin if you want, then go to the “edit/add” screen to configure some sliders. Each slider you setup has all kinds of options for you to choose from.

You can see in the image above the first settings are to display the slider in a loop, how many characters to truncate descriptions to both with and without an image, what HTML tags are allowed, how many articles to include in the slider, the display order (newest posts, featured posts, most commented, random order), thumbnail size, slider size, and whether to dipslay thumbnails or author links. Since you can set the size of the slider, you can even add this as a sidebar widget (but more on that later).

The image above are even more settings, where you can actually choose what content the slider shows (the “Content Settings” section). You can choose whether your featured content will be drawn from post or pages (one OR the other, not both), you can choose the text for the “read more” link, and whether or not the article title is a clickable link.

In the “Display Settings” are you actually chose WHERE the slider will show up. This is particularly handy if you’ve moved your blog to the homepage to an inner page, and made an inner page your homepage. With this feature you can assign the slider to the proper page directly from the dashboard (without having to edit any theme code). Your options are to show the slider on one, none, or any category page, and then any static pages, AND / or your homepage. You can also choose whether the navigation for the sliders is on the bottom, or the sides.

You can choose whether or not to have a read more link, whether the article title is clickable:

As if that weren’t enough, you can give your slider section a title, and then select from one of the 4 included themes. You can also choose the JavaScript settings for the duration of the slide effect, fade distance, whether the slides enter from the left or top, whether navigation click stops auto sliding, and whether users can use a mouse wheel for navigation in the sliders. You can choose to autoslide every xx seconds as well.

The fact that this plugin allows you to add a featured content slider to your site without having to edit any theme code at all makes it one of our top picks – and we hadn’t even mentioned that it comes with it’s own sidebar widget! Keep in mind that you have to setup a slider with a widget the same or less than your sidebar in order for it to work. But it’s so easy to drag the “FA Lite Slider” to your sidebar and then just a slider (once it’s created). If you absolutely have to manually add a slider to a specific section of your site (like the header or footer, or very custom page) – hey, that’s an option too! There’s not much you can’t do with this thing.

Download Featured Articles Lite here.

Here’s a shot of the light style in action:

(click image for full size)

2. Featured Content

Featured Content is a plugin that barely breaks our rule of 2011 updates (it was last updated on Dec 15th of 2010), but it has a 5 star rating and has been downloaded 3,000+ times. We decided to list this one because it’s unique, and you’ll see why.

This plugin creates a custom post type for the featured content it displays and allows you to feauture content in your sidebar or pages that either open posts directly, or display in cool little modal windows.

(click image for full version)

in the image above you see some featured content images that were displayed using shortcodes.

The image above is how it looks in a sidebar.

(click image for full size)

The image above is how the featured content displays in the modal window (if you use that option).

Configuration: To setup the featured content areas this plugin uses either widgets or shortcodes.

In the image above the general features (settings) are the choice of index slude, indentifier, permalink structure for the custom post types, plural and singular name, and you can choose to enable thumbnails, taxonomies, custom fields, comments, trackbacks, or revisions (or not).

This plugin is really cool, but we would say it’s for WordPress users on an intermediate to advanced level. Also, it’s only at version 0.3.1 (but did seem to work well).

Download the Featured Content plugin here.

3. WP Featured Content Slider

Well, the first thing we liked about the WP Featured Content Slider was that there was a demo for us to check out. That’s always a plus! It does support manual insertion of the slideshow, and supports shortcodes as well. It has a 4 star rating on 45,000+ downloads, and is in version 2.1.

(click image for full version)

The image above is what the featured content slider might look like in your theme.

Configuration: The image above are the settings for this plugin which seem a bit basic compared to some of the others. You do get 4 effect options, and you can set height, width, background color, bg color, border, text color, and image width and height (which is great).

What’s missing here are the options for how many posts or pages to use as “featured content” (and which ones to use).

That’s because the option of what pages and posts to include are actually on the post and page edit screens like in the image above.

In the image above you’ll another item on page and post edit screens, the ability to set a “featured image” (for that page or post to be in the slider).

The nice thing about this plugin is it’s easy to use without a ton of options to worry about. It’s easy to add the slider to any page or post using the [featslider] shortcode, but it couldn’t be any bigger than the content area of that page (which is a drawback). You can manually add the slider with the PHP code, and there doesn’t appear to be any widget support. All in all, if you need a simple slider, this can do the job.

Download WP Featured Content Slider Here.

4. Feature Slideshow

Feature Slideshow has 9,000+ downloads and 4 star review, now in 1.1.1-beta. It’s easy to choose the size of the slideshow, and this one (unlike others) has the ability to choose the number of posts to be displayed or the ability to use specific post categories OR tags. It has automatic scaling and cropping of images, and you can see a demo here.

(click image for full size)

You can see in the demo above that this is the type of featured content slideshow found in may popular premium themes. It’s nice because it has the links and text in a shaded area to the left, with an arrow pointing to the image on the right.

Configuration: Basic options are broken down into visual settings and post settings as follows:

You can set the slideshow widget, list width, overlay text size, title color, transition interval, number of posts to show, and post type (posts or pages).

(click image for full size)

There are also some advanced settings, where you can choose the order, child ID’s of parent pages, and specific categories.

When you setup a slideshow, all posts to be displayed must have a featured image. You also have to enter a short description in the “feature slideshow options” metabox on the post edit screens. There is no widget support, you can add slideshows using shortcodes or manual PHP insertion into your WP theme. This plugin is best used by WP users with intermediate to advanced experience levels.

Download Feature Slideshow here.

5. SM Sticky Featured Widget

SM Sticky Featured Widget is only a widget, but if you only want to feature content in a widget – this may be just what you need! You can use thumbnails (or not), and has the cool option to display “category related sticky posts” when the widget appears on category pages. You can make this thing work quickly just by making posts “sticky”.

The example above is what it looks like with thumbnails in a WordPress site using a classified theme. The plugin has 2,600+ downloads and is in version 1.1.0 with a 4 star rating. We won’t go into any specific configuration options, it’s pretty easy to use.

Download SM Sticky Featured Widget here.

6. Promotion Slider

We always like things that have unique applications, because when it comes to featured content, sliders, and carousels – the one thing they all tend to have in common it that they’re all so similar. You’re about to see some examples that might change your mind about that – and give you some new ideas. The Promotion Slider plugin has had 37,000+ plugins for version 3.3.1 with an average rating of 4 1/2 stars. They even have a cool demo video.

The main features this plugin boasts are ad management from the dashboard, creation of unique pages for each promotion, a jQuery animation that’s actually “SEO friendly”, default styles, the ability to link to external URL’s (w00t!), the ability to display third party ad code, title and/or excerpt support, the ability to add multiple sliders to one page without conflicts, and works with custom post types.

Let’s look at some example screenshots:

(click image for full size)

Wow, not your standard slider – huh!

Examples with ad image, text title, and link.

(click image for full version)

The example above has cool thumbnail image navigation!

Configuration: Let’s fire this thing up and see what it does!

One installed you’ll see the options appear in your sidebar like the image above. If you’ve used WP 3.0+ custom post types, you’ll realize right away that the ability to manage promotions and add new ones are just custom post type screens (awesome!).

(click image for full size)

The screen above is the add new promotion edit screen.

The image above is the area below the content area on the add new promotion page. You have the ability to change the linking behaviour (open in same page or new window), and you can set the link to an external URL if you don’t want to use the internal post link page (awesome!). Or you can even check the box to “insert ad code”, and leave the add new promotion content area blank, and add some ad code in here (like adsense, VERY cool).

If THAT weren’t enough – there’s even one more option field to serve the URL of the image (if you’re using one) from a custom content delivery network!

The Promotion Slider has it’s own category screen, because the items are custom post types – you can set distinct categories for them (completely separate from post categories!). That means you can bin your ads in all kinds of different new ways for display.

The first section of Promotion Slider’s options are “Slider Settings”. You can choose to start on the first slide (or a random one), automatic slide advancement can be on or off, and you can set default thumbnail size.

The second set of settings for Promotion Slider are for display. You can choose from 5 types of slider navigation, 3 kinds of title display, and whether or not to display the excerpt in the slider. You even get advanced settings for loading the javascript in the header of footer!

In the end, we found this plugin pretty robust for all levels of WP experience. We LOVE the fact that you can (finally) create a slider without having to use normal posts and pages! The ability to use custom post types and their own categories is a God-send. Also, the added ability to point to external links and use third party ad code, again – WOW! It has a great shortcode, with 13 different additional attributes you can use with it, see the FAQ for full info. You can even use the shortcodes in a text widget!

The only bad thing we can say about this plugin was there wasn’t a lot of options for styling the display – HOWEVER, in the FAQ there’s info about how to give a slider it’s own HTML id so you can style it any way you want. So that’s our only complaint – that there aren’t more display style layouts to choose from (out of the box). If that’s our only complaint, well I guess that isn’t so bad, is it?

Download Promotion Slider here.

7. Smooth Slider

Smooth Slider has a 4 star rating and more than 102,000+ downloads for version 2.3.5 – so it’s pretty mature (and widely used).

At first we didn’t know why – because the display is pretty basic:

(click image for full size)

Then again, if something is simple and works, it’s popular right? What you see is what you get, an image, title, description, and some basic navigation. You’ll also see in that image a link back to the plugin site, but there’s an option to disable it Misc settings.

Configuration: One thing we liked about this plugin was the fact that as you build a slider, there’s a “preview” pane at the top of the page – so you can see what the thing is going to look like in advance. We wish all the slider plugins had this. This pluggin does allow you to setup multiple sliders, and has the ability to add them to pages with either a shortcode, or manual PHP code.

In the image above you see the slider box options. You can change the slide interval, transition speed, number of posts to show in the slideshow, background color (with color picker), slider height and width, and border color.

The navigation button options are pretty exhaustive, you can show next and prev, nothing, numbers, you can even choose the image size or custom text or HTML (for your own images). We hadn’t seen that many options for navigation in the other plugins.

For the slider and post title options you can choose text, where to get the title from (slider name or default title), font face, size, style, etc.

In thumbnail image options you can choose how to pick images, how to align image, the image size and max height, border thickness and color, and even a checkbox to convert smooth slider to an image slider (with no content).

In the slider content options you can choose the font face, font color, font style, where to pick content from (content, excerpts, custom fields), and max content size in both words and characters.

The Misc slider settings allow you to turn off the link back to the plugin on the front end display, offer the ability to retain certain HTML tags, the “read more” text, who can add posts to the slider, randomization, text to display for browsers without Javascript support, whether or not to allow shortcode support, styles to use, whether or not to enable the multiple slider (per page) option, and even an option to enable or disable the “flash of unstyled content” you see on so many pages loading sliders.

I guess NOW we see why a plugin that at first seemed so basic, had so many downloads! The configuration options are nearly endless! You could use this plugin with any level of WP experience, but just be prepared for the myriad of setup options. If you want fine grained control to configure EVERYTHING (and you’re ok with a basic display) then this is the plugin for you.

Download Smooth Slider here.

8. Easy Nivo Slider

Next we look at Easy Nivo Slider, which has a 4 star rating on 11,000+ downloads in version 1.6.1. Like some of the other sliders which we chose for various reasons, Easy Nivo has some unique configuration options of it’s own. Like the ability to add the slider to a post or page with no coding using a button on the WP visual editor toolbar! Also, you can build sliders from post images, featured images in posts, or from NextGen galleries. In addition, it uses WordPress native thumbnail supporrt, to make sure all the images fit the sliders you build.

One thing we should tell you is that a lot of the slider plugins just build upon an already existing open source jQuery slider. “Nivo” is an open source jQuery plugin, so there are multiple WordPress slider plugins with “Nivo” in the name (that go by all kinds of different names). So follow our download links, or be sure to explicitly search for “Easy Nivo Slider” to install the one we’re reviewing here.

Another thing is, (this) Nivo slider is primarily for images. There’s caption support, but you’ll see in the following examples how that looks:

(click image for full size)

The plugin has slider settings for a first slider, second slider, and even a widget slider:

First slider options are above, with size, number of slices, linking, opacity, navigation, and “jump to slide” navigation.

This plugin also has a “preview” screen, where you can also choose image selection and slider settings. You can choose one of 14 different transition options.

On the settings screen you can choose whether or not to activate NextGen gallery supporrt, use debug mode, and how to load the code.

(click image for full size)

In the image above you can see where the button is to add a slider from the visual editor on the edit screen for posts or pages.

(click image for full size)

The image above shows the options for adding a slider to a post – where you can chose slider size, transition, speed, and pause. There are 2 other tabs for featured images slider options, and NextGen Slider options.

All in all this is a great little plugin that any WP user of any experience level could use. Just keep in mind it’s basically for images – but the NextGen gallery support is nice, and the ability to add from the visual editor (without any coding) EVEN nicer!

Download Easy Nivo Slider here.

9. NextGen Gallery Sliders

Ok, since the last plugin had NextGen Gallery support, and there are a lot of NextGen Gallery slider plugins out there – let’s just give you some basic options (if that’s what you’re looking for).

There’s JJ NextGen JQuery Slider:

Here’s NextGen Image List

Also JJ NextGen jQuery Carousel

10. UnPointZero Slider

The UnPointZero Slider has a 4 star review on version 2.1.5 with 6,000+ downloads. It has fully customizable CSS, and you can set slider navigation with arrows, numbers, or even advanced options with thumbnails. It has shortcode support and you can use manual PHP code insertion where you want it to display.

We included it because the layouts are what you would come to expect from a slider, like these examples:

(click image for full size)

The image above shows a slider with Title and overlay text, and the navigation are thumbnails with text to the right.

The image above is a slider exaple with just image and overlay, and simple arrow based navigation.

(click image for full size)

And this example is an image with overlay text a bit smaller, and number based navigation in the top right corner.

Configuration: On the settings page for Unpointzero slider, the first thing you see is the “Embed Code and shortcode” section. It’s very refreshing to see this right on the settings page, so you don’t have dig through a readme file or plugin page to find the right PHP code or shortcode to use to insert the slider. If even shows the shortcode or PHP code to insert multiple sliders.

The General options for the plugin are whether to use posts or pages, and after that there’s a unique feature where you can use either the page/post names OR ID numbers to be included in the slider. The next section is “only for POSTS” – where you choose the number of posts to be displayed. You can choose all posts (not recommended), 10 posts, 20 posts, or auto.

In display settings you can choose the number of slides, characters for the title and description, and width and height of the front image and small images.

You also get to choose whether or not to display thumbnails in navigation, the title or description, mouseover actions, and even a special setting for displaying non-Latin languages (like Hebrew, Chinese, etc.).

The Unpointzero slider plugin is pretty intuitive with standard options. Normal posts and pages are used as the “featured content” for the slides. This plugin is best used by users with intermediate to advanced WP experience levels. One thing we didn’t particularly like was that the plugin documentation and settings page don’t really say where the images for the slides come from. We did finally figure out that it’s the post featured images:

We kind of figured that, but the plugin documentation should have said it (for people that don’t know). You just have to set a featured image for each post being included in the slider. All in all, if you want a slider that looks like one of standard slider design examples we showed – this will do the job.

Download Unpointzero Slider here.

11. jQuery Slider

The jQuery Slider has 5 star ratings for 14,000+ downloads in version 1.3. This plugin is very basic, but does what’s expected. It produces a nice looking featured slider with some overlay text like this:

In the top right it displays an active timer before the next slide displays in a “0-60″ circle fashion. You can see the demo here. You can insert the slider either via shortcode on PHP code.

Configuration: The options are basic, but the plugin works well.

You can see in the options above you only get 5 things, width, height, pause on hover, show pagination, and show navigation.

This plugin uses custom post types to setup your slides, which is a great feature we saw in a few earlier examples. Sometimes you just don’t want to use your existing posts and pages as featured content, and the option to setup custom posts for the slider is really great.

The image above is the example of the slider management screen.

(click image for full size)

The image above is simplicity at it’s best. You just give the slide a title, and description, and then set the featured image. Having exhaustive options is great (when you need them), but this is a plugin that we would feel comfortable telling users with beginner WP experience levels to use.

With the shortcode you can add the slider easily to a post or page, or even in a text widget. There aren’t a ton of layout options, but sometimes you just don’t need all that.

Download jQuery Slider here.

12. Related Posts Slider

We included the related posts slider because it does something very unique. It adds a slider beneath your content for “related posts”. It has both shortcode and widget support. It can show a slider either in news style, or horizontal carousel format. You can add as many related posts as you want, you get complete CSS customization (with 2 styles in the box), and it’s even compatible with the YARPP or WordPress Related Posts plugin.

Here’s the example of news style format:

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The points on the top and bottom show which elements are customizable.

Here’s the horizontal carousel format layout example:

(click image for full size)

This is a very nice compact slider design with thumbnail and title, and left and right navigation arrows. This is a very cool layout, and something you normally only see on high-end news sites.

Configuration: To use this plugin you first have to install the YARPP or WordPress Related Posts.

In the image above for overall slider settings, you see you have to choose which plugin you’re using and the slider format (default or carousel). Then select a style, number of posts, slider height, background color, foreground color, background for hover, text color for hover, outer border thickness, outer border color,and inner border thickness, and inner border color.

The the slider title options you can set the text, font type, font size, weight, and style.

In thumbnail image settings you can use a custom field or key namefor images, or featured images, but there’s even an option to consider images fromm within the post. This is a great featured because you can set it to use the post image (if there is one), but the featured image as a backup. So if you’ve got 300 posts and have been blogging since before there was “featured images” in WP 3.0+ – you can use both old and new posts. You can also choose alignment, image width, and width and height.

In list section settings you can choose the font face, color, size, weight, and style – along with max words in the title.

For the preview section you can choose title font, color, size, weight, style, the same for content font, where to pick content from (excerpt, custom fields, or content), max words, whether or not to show read more (and the text for it), what HTML to retain, and whether or not to open links in a new window.

The last section of options for the Related Posts slider is “Manual Insertion”:

This is something we’d like to see ALL the slider plugins have, the ability to insert the slider before the content, after the content, or manually (quickly and easily). You can also choose to turn the link back to the plugin author on the front end on or off.

This plugin is unique and has great options. We don’t have to show how to add related posts to the slider, because the YARPP or WordPress Related Posts plugin(s) do that automatically, and the settings page determines how those posts are displayed. Although there are a ton of setup options, this is a plugin that someone with any level of WP experience could setup and use.

Download Related Posts Slider here, or install from your WordPress dashboard.

13. Content Slider by SlideDeck

We saved the Content Slider by SlideDeck for last because it’s very unique. It has 92,000+ downloads on a 4 star review of version 1.4. This is the only plugin we listed that has both a Free and a paid Premium version, and we’ll go over those options.

The things that make the Content Slider stand out are that you can add images, video, or mp3 audio to the slides, it has a drag and drop interface, you can use the built-in WordPress “Kitchen Sink” editor to format the slides, you can preview the slides as you’re building them, and it’s SEO optimized. The PRO version has touchscreen support for Apple devices, you can create vertical slides, you can apply skins and themes, and you can create smart slidedecks from RSS feeds.

So, let’s look at some exampe layouts – shall we?

This is an example slider with image, title, content, navigation – as you can see it’s beautifully styled!

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You can see a full width example slider above with navigation, and overlay title and text in a smoky strip at the slide top.

Now check out THIS example:

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This is an example of a slider that’s accordion style with 4 sections. Click on each section to expand. This first slide actually has a video in it that you can play IN THE SLIDER!

(click image for full size)

The image above shows what happens when you click play on the video (the screenshot is of the actual video playing). The rest of the slider goes away, and you get video controls and a “back” button. How awesome is that?

(click image for full size)

Pay close attention to the example above because that slider example is NOT what you think it is. If you look where my mouse pointer is on the left, you’ll see the vertical strip with the 4 icons. EACH ONE of those icons is clickable AND if you click any one of them, it loads a new slide WITHIN THAT SLIDE! If you think about it, it’s actually a featured content slider WITHIN a featured content slider!

(click image for full size)

In the example above it’s actually a slide with 4 clickable areas. I clicked on the + icon in this example – which displays the popup as shown. But that’s not all…

(click image for full size)

When I clicked the play button icon in the example image above, the popup actually has a VIDEO in it that loads on the page without reloading (from within the slider). OMG! Talk about a geeky heart attack! View all those examples here.

Configuration: Now (of course) all that cool vertical slide stuff is only available in the PRO version. So the main questions are – how easy is this thing to setup, and what can you do with the free version out of the box? The PRO Premium version is $99 for a single site, so let’s see what we can do with the free open source version from the WordPress repository.

There are basically 2 ways to add slides, you can “add new” or “add smart slide deck”.

To add a new slide deck, start by giving it a name, and then go through and give each slide a title, and some content. You can see you can format the content any way you want with a visual or HTML editors, and ability to upload images, or even upload and set background images.

In the “add new” edit screen you have slidedeck options to autoplay, loop, show active corner indicator, allow keyboard navigation, or mouse scroll wheel. You can hide the title bars, choose animation speed, the skin (7 styles), and what slide to start on.

You can also reorder the slides with drag and drop from the edit screen as in the image above. The only weird non-intuitive features is that the “add another slide” button is within the re-order slides widget (only). So if you don’t know how to add another slide, you may spend a few minutes looking.

You can get the theme code snippet (for manual insertion) from the slide edit screen. Those were some great options for adding a slide deck. Now let’s take a look at adding a “smart slidedeck”.

First you give it a name, and then choose a skin style.

Then you choose the total numbber of slides to display, playback options, type of content (recent posts, featured posts, popular posts, filter posts by category), you can validate images, and choose the navigation type.

So with the Content Slider plugin you can actually create a content slider that has unique content all it’s own (we showed that in the “Add new” example above). Or, with the smart slide deck you can actually create a content slider from your existing content. In all the previous plugins we tested they either used existing content, or had the ability to create custom slides. This is the only plugin we found that does both.

When you create a smart slidedeck, you can even preview it lightbox style:

(click image for full size)

AND, you can even change the slide dimensions LIVE in the preview!

Once you add a new (custom) slidedeck, or create a “smart” slidedeck, you can easily go back and edit them from the edit screen:

(click image for full size)

So, with the Content Slider plugin you can add as many slidedecks as you want. So far we could do a TON of stuff with the Free open source version. What we haven’t looked at yet was how to add a slider into your site (other than the manual PHP code snippet we got on the edit screen).

If you go to any normal post or page edit screen in your WordPress dashboard you’ll see this box above the “publish” section on the right:

You can choose the slide title (if that post or page is going to be a slide), and you can check the checkbox to “feature this post in smart slidedecks”.

At the bottom there’s also a button to “Insert SlideDeck”.

(click image for full size)

When you click that button you get the dialogue box above, where you can choose to insert any of your existing slidedecks, and you can even set the dimentions right there!

Once embedded the shortcode is automatically added to your post or page in the edit box, as in the example above. We also used that image to show that if you’re using the visual editor there’s also a bright colored “SD” icon on the toolbar to embed a slidedeck as well.

So, while we found the free version to be incredible for the content slider – you probably want to know what’s missing that only comes with the PRO (paid) version. What you get with PRO is support (yay!), it’s unbranded, you get vertical slide capability, RSS Feed Smart SlideDeck capability, Background image support, and API capability (for the programmers in the crowd). Oh, PRO has touchscreen support as well.

In our opinion, the Content Slider is the most intuitive, has the most features, and the free version will work for most uses. It could easily be setup by users with any level of WordPress experience, and inserting sliders to your site is a breeze. This plugin is very mature, well thought out, and the only one that you can either create sliders with custom or existing content, AND use audio, video, images, AND text from within the slides.

Download the free open source version of Content Slider here, or install from your WordPress dashboard.

Conclusion

We covered some amazing WordPress slider plugins, and there should be one there for about any use you would have no matter what your experience level. Just make sure to choose one you feel comfortable using, that meets your needs. Figure out in advance if it’s better (for you) to use a featured content slider that uses existing post and page content, or that creates distinctly different content to be used exclusively for the slider. Every one of the plugins featured is completely free, and can be installed from the “Plugins->Add Plugins” page of your WordPress dashboard from the official repository. Have fun!

If you liked this post – by all means please stumble, like it, add us on Twitter or Facebook (page top), etc.

Today I’m giving the presentation “100 Things You Should Know About WordPress” at WordCamp Columbus. I’ve given this presentation once before, with Anthony Montalbano (founder of WordCamp Detroit) at WordPress Ann Arbor. The previous 100 Things You Should Know About WordPress page is here.

Basically it’s 10 slides with 10 things on 10 topics that are about or affect WordPress. Tips, tricks, and best practices are presented – in kind of a rapid-fire format (lol). Some of the content would be more beginner or intermediate – but there is definitely points and nuggets of wisdom for all levels of WordPress experience.

The 10 Topics are (drumroll please…)

1. Webhosting and WordPress
2. Setup and Installing WordPress
3. Choosing a WordPress Theme
4. WordPress Security
5. Default Plugins to Install
6. Content Creation
7. Theme Modification
8. Fundamental Plugins to Install
9. Content Organization
10. WordPress Resources

The full slide deck for the presentation is on SlideShare – feel free to download, embed on your own website, etc.

In the presentation there’s one slide for each of those 10 items, and of course everybody will want the links and resources that go along with each. So, each of the 10 above is linked to the appropriate content page – so you can get everything you need (if you were there in person, or even if you weren’t!).

WordPress has had the ability to create custom post types since version 3.0+, but it’s widely perceived as something so technical only a programmer or coder would want to try it. You can easily create your own custom posts types with a plugin (and no coding) in just minutes using this tutorial. You will (however) have to know how to edit your own theme files in order to make content created using these new custom posts types show up on your website…but we’ll show you how!

What are Custom Post Types?

Custom Post Types in WordPress are just another way to sort content using posts (and a great way to build a taxonomy). In our last post we talked about poor permalinks causing site performance issues if you have too many static pages in your WP site. More and more businesses are using WordPress for informational websites, which may or may not use the “blogging” capability that WordPress offers. Also, proponents of other open source CMS system (like Drupal, Joomla, etc) will say that WordPress is only good for blogging because it lacks taxonomy capabilities for sorting content.

Before WordPress 3.0, you had “posts” or “pages” in WordPress. Posts were blog posts, and pages were static pages (like your about or contact pages). Pages can have a heirarchy, where you can have a parent page and assign children. Posts cannot. But posts can have both tags and categories assigned – but pages cannot.

Custom Post Types are a completely new way to sort content. It can be heirarchal, it can have custom attributes, you can use tags and categories (or not), and you can choose whether it supports a title, excerpts, trackbacks, custom fields, comments, revisions, thumbnails, authors, page attributes, or even whether the default “editor” is used (or not).

In other words a custom post type can be anything from an image, to a file, media like audio / video, or custom content that doesn’t fit the normal mold, like a movie review, recipe, business listing, products, services, business cards, ads, classifieds, reviews – you name it!

Before custom posts types people used to ask “how can I do XYZ in WordPress”, and we’d have to find a way to do it (within the constraints of a page or a post). Now, we have nearly unlimited ways for building custom websites from scratch using native WordPress functionality.

How do I Create a Custom Post Type?

In your WordPress dashboard’s left had sidebar you normally see something like this in default WP:

You have your normal posts, media, links, pages, comments, etc.

Install the Custom Post Type UI plugin by Brad Williams and Webdev Studios. That’s what we’re going to use for this tutorial, but you could also use the CMS Press plugin as a UI to create custom post types (if you want an alternative).

Once you install and activate the plugin, you’ll have this new menu in your left sidebar of your WP dashboard admin:

The first link is some basic informational links and a (slightly outdated) video. Add new if for creating new items, and of course the manage links are for managing existing items.

Some people that we’ve suggested this plugin to have said “I can’t figure out how to create a custom post type”, and we’re figuring they didn’t watch the video? It’s pretty easy once you understand the basics.

Custom Post Types: this is the name of the kind of content you’re sorting, like blog, recipes, movies, ads, reviews, products, services, etc.

Taxonomies: these are the attributes that describe the custom post type name. Like if the custom post type were recipes, the taxonomies for it might be prep time, ingredients, skill level, etc.

So when you go to the “Add New” screen of Custom Post Type UI on the left side is a form for creating custom post types, and on the right is a form for creating custom taxonomies.

Create the new custom post type first:

You’re only required to fill out the first box with the name of your post type. There advanced options – but you don’t have to fill any of them out (unless you need to). We wanted to sort our blog posts for a new site in a custom post type – so we created one called “blog”.

Then (if we need one) we would create custom taxonomies for the post type:

Pay attention to the image above, and the last section where it says “attach to post type”. You can use this plugin to create custom taxonomy items, and then attached them to (standard WordPress) posts or pages (without creating a post type).

For example, if you created a taxonomy called “sponsor_name” and another called “sponsor_URL”, and assigned them both to “posts”, then you could add names and URL’s as taxonomy items in your posts, and then code your theme to say “this post sponsored by: Company ABC” (and the business name would be linked). When you add taxonomy items and attach it to something (like a post) you get standard editing boxes in the right sidebar of the editing screen when you add or edit items (where the tag and category boxes normally are). There are a lot of advanced options you could use (if you wanted to), especially for labels.

For our example, setting up post types for “blog” we decided we didn’t need a custom taxonomy, we just wanted to use standard tags and categories, and we’ll use custom taxonomy items later on for post types like “products” and “services”.

To do that we went to the “Manage Custom Post Types” screen, and then clicked edit:

Then we went to the “advanced options” by clicking that link:

You can see in the image above you have a lot of settings, but in the last section you can choose to use native WordPress “Built-in Taxonomies” for any post type (categories and post tags).

I Created a Custom Post Type – Now What?

Well, it’s time to create some content! When you create a custom post type – you’ll see it appear as a new top level menu item in the left sidebar of your dashboard admin like this:

So, just like pages, posts, links, media, and comments, custom post types have their own menu for sorting and adding new items. The first sub-link be default (blog in this example) is the list of items for that post type, and “add” is to create new ones. Beneath that your taxonomy items will be listed, and for this example since we chose built-in taxonomy items (categories and post tags) they are listed here.

Something to note is that if you use the built-in taxonomy items, any tags or categories you create are shared with normal “posts”. So the advantage of using custom taxonomy items is that those attributes will ONLY be used for that post type (unlike built-in WP ones).

If we click on “Add blog” then we get the normal edit screen like this:

Looks just like we’re adding a post – doesn’t it? You may be scratching your head asking – “if all you were going to do was sort blog posts AND you were going to use tags and categories anyway, why didn’t you just use normal posts?” Good question! The reason is, now that we’ve created a custom post type for “blog” posts, in the future if we can add any custom taxomies to it that we want (if we choose to at a later date). If we just start blogging away in “posts”, we’re completely limited to what standard WP posts can do.

How Do I get a Custom Post Type to Display in My Theme?

Ok, it was pretty easy to create a custom post type, and it’s pretty easy to create custom taxonomy items – but don’t think that when you create items using these new post types that they’re going to just appear on your home page (or anywhere else!).

A custom post type is just that – it’s CUSTOM. That means your WordPress theme (out of the box) is built to display normal wordpress pages and posts. If you want to show a custom post type – you have to add the (theme) code to support it.

From Justin Tadlock’s Showing Custom Post Types On Your Home Page you can get the code that allows you to “add” custom post types to your homepage loop. In other words, if your WordPress homepage has a list of posts, and created post types for “books”, “movies”, and “music” – with that code you could have your homepage show your posts + those posts types as well (mixed in a timeline). You can do the same for your RSS feed with some additional code.

That’s great if all you want to do is mix your new post types in on your homepage. Odds are, most of you might want to show your new post types on an inner page of your website though.

In that case, what you need to do is create a new static “page template” for your theme.

Hey – WAIT, don’t close this windows JUST YET – it’s NOT as bad as you think!

Here’s what you do…

In your WordPress dashboard go to “appearance->editor”, and when the page reloads, find your Page Template or “page.php” on the right and click on it. Once it loads up select all the text and copy it.

On your computer open a text editor (like Notepad) and paste all the code you just copied.

Now in the very top you want to add these 3 lines of code before everything else to give it a template name like this:

<?php
/*Template Name: PostTypeBlog*/
?>

That’s what tells WordPress that this is a page template. Replace the name “PostTypeBlog” in those 3 lines with the name of your new post type.

This is where it gets a little bit tricky because different WordPress themes build “the_loop” differently. Your basically looking for the section of code in your page.php that looks like this (and every theme is a little different):

<?php if(have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

The, you’re going to replace that normal standard WP post loop with one for your new custom post type like this:

<?php $recent = new WP_Query('post_type=blog&posts_per_page=10');
while($recent->have_posts()) : $recent->the_post();?>

the WP_Query function of WordPress is VERY customizable, and you can modify the code in that string (if you want) to alter the number of items displayed, their order, and all kinds of other sorting options (like by author or taxonomy item).

Basically “as-is” that code is just a WP Query to show only “blog” post types. Of course replace if your post type were ‘movies’ then you’d edit that code to be post_type=movies, etc. Once you get the code the way you want it, save that in your text editor as something like “blog-post-type.php” and in your FTP program upload it to your theme folder in your website.

Once you upload your new page template for the post type to your WordPress theme directory, all you have to do is create a new static page – in our case we just created one called “blog”. Then before you publish it, in the right hand side under the publish box, you’ll see the page attributes:

If you did everything right, the name of your new template should be listed in the “Template” dropdown (like our BlogPostType), just select it and “publish” the page.

Then when you view that page on the front end of your website, you should now be able to see the new custom posts type items listed (just like you would ordinary posts):

Can I Customize the Display of Custom Post Page Even More?

What we didn’t show you were the myriad of options you could use for customizing the display of your new post types. In our example we just copied your standard WordPress static page template, and you can see in the last image that we’re just showing a title and then content, and an edit link.

What we’re not showing are tags, categories, date and time, author, or any meta info at all (the things you’d see in a normal list of posts). Because this is a page template, we’re just showing a list of custom post type content – you can’t even click on the titles for a single one at a time view (like normal posts) because we didn’t link them. So the example we gave would be best suited for something like a events page maybe, a portfolio page, or something where it lists things – but items don’t need their own single pages.

So we better give you a little more info (and code), because we think a LOT of you will want to go even further with this example…

Our example is a new page called “blog”, and we want it to show a list of “blog” posts, a little meta info, and then an excerpt of the content. Readers will have to click the linked title to read the whole blog post.

So this is what we did…

In our default static template (that we created the custom post template theme file from), inside “the loop”, the titles are created like this:

<h2 class="entry-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h2>

We changed the code to make it a linked title like this:

<h2 class="title"></h2>

POSTED: <?php the_time('m/j/y g:i A') ?><br />

<div class="entry-meta">

POSTED: <?php the_time('m/j/y g:i A') ?><br />
FILED AS: <?php the_category(', ') ?><br />
COMMENTS FEED: <?php comments_rss_link('RSS 2.0'); ?>

</div>

<li><?php echo get_the_term_list($post->ID,  'genre', 'Genre: ', ', ', ''); ?></li>
<li><?php echo  get_the_term_list($post->ID, 'actors', 'Actors: ', ', ', '');  ?></li>
<li><?php echo get_the_term_list($post->ID,  'director', 'Director: ', ', ', ''); ?></li>

We’re going to draw knowledge from the official WordPress Codex Conditional Tag page for this and the get_post_type function like this in the code:

<?php
if ( 'blog' == get_post_type() )

{

//then show this custom post type loop

}

else
{

//then show the normal single post loop

}

For the sake of brevity (in this VERY long post) I’m not going to show the custom post type and normal single post code. If you’ve gotten this far in this tutorial, you’ll know exactly how to tweak and set that up for a custom single post pages.

Custom Post Type Resources

We hope this post has helped you in some small way – and if (like us) you benefit from multiple examples, please by all means look at some of these additional resources for WordPress custom post types:

Essential Guide to WordPress 3.0 Custom Taxonomies: good taxonomy specific info
Create your first WordPress Custom Post Type: good resource for how to do it all by hand without a plugin
Create a Professional Portfolio Using WordPress custom post types: Great example for a portfolio

If you’re looking for the best permalink structure for WordPress, you must also think about both SEO and speed. Ranking well in Google is of prime importance, but you don’t want a slower site because of poor permalink structure – especially since Google now uses “site speed” as one of the ranking factors in it’s search algorithm. Today we’re going to teach you what we’ve learned about WordPress permalinks over time, and how we set them up for both SEO and speed.

What ARE Permalinks?

Permalinks are the links within your WordPress website. The links to posts, pages, tags, categories, archives – all that stuff.

By default WordPress uses a system where every one of those items has an “ID” number. In your WordPress dashboard if you go to “Settings->Permalinks” you’ll find that you can change the default “permalink structure” from being ID based to more of a “pretty permalink” (one with actual words, which are more useful in search engine ranking).

The image above is the permalinks settings page. When you install WordPress, “default” is checked and you can see that the URL’s are www.site.com/?p=123 where 123 equals the ID of an item. If you do nothing with your permalinks, by default your website will work just fine, and all the URL’s will contain or end with an ID number like that. Over time people figured out that having the actual title of the post or page in the URL instead of the ID boosted your search rankings, and that’s why everyone wants the “pretty permalink” instead.

How do Permalinks Work?

Without getting really technical, in the most basic terms WordPress itself has to “rewrite” each URL on request (on the fly). When a request comes in for www.site.com/sample-page WordPress does some hocus pocus and matching to correlate /sample-post to the real ID in the database.

What you REALLY Need to know: Something that very few people seem to know is WordPress has about “20 rewrite rules” in a default installation. These 20 rules are for matching permalinks to posts, pages, tags, categories, author pages, etc. That means EVERY single time a URL is served in WordPress all or part of the 20 rewrite rules (until it finds the right match). When a URL is served WordPress says “ok, how do I match it – is it this, is it that”. Even though there are 20 rewrite rules, WordPress is still VERY, VERY fast – because we’re talking about microseconds here.

What “can” slow down a WordPress site is the combination of having too many paged Pages AND a bad permalink structure. Within WordPress you have (blog) posts, and then what we call static Pages (generally used for About, Contact, etc.).

If you have a poor permalink structure, then each WordPress page you create adds 11 rewrite rules (on top of the original 20). So if you have 1 contact page and 1 about page, that’s 22 additional rewrite rules. If you have 10 products and services pages, then you’ve added 110 additional rewrite rules. Once the rewrite rules get above 200+, that’s when you start noticing performance issues, so if you have 15-20+ static pages in your WordPress website – you’re at risk.

First, we should say that even if your permalink structure is bad, and causes the extra rewrite rules – if all you have is an About page and Contact page (and all the rest of your content is in posts) none of this may matter to you. Where we’re seeing problems is WordPress is being used as a fully fledged CMS for informational sites more and more (especially with small businesses). Many of these sites have 20-60 static pages of products and services, and then many are using posts as well (as a blog). That’s where you start running into problems (poor permalinks and 20+ pages).

What Are the Server Performance Issues?

The best way to describe this is to just re-post what core WordPress developer Otto had to say in a recent forum post about “Which Permalink Structure is Best?”.

This is what he had to say about permalinks and server issues:

Also, after a certain point, you start running into database server limitations. If the generated rewrite rules can’t be stored, then they have to be regenerated on every page load, which causes a thousand or more extra queries to the database server. This completely kills the site, more or less instantly. The underlying problem here comes from the rewrite rules string exceeding the mySQL max_allowed_packet size, which on many setups defaults to 1MB or so.

Future versions of WordPress may improve upon this issue, however the underlying problem will likely always remain. If there’s no easy and obvious way to tell a Page URL apart from a Post URL, then WordPress will have to create rule systems that allow it to do so in order to be able to serve webpages up as rapidly as possible.

Otto wrote a great article last year you might also like to read: “Category in Permalinks Considered Harmful“

He shows some of the normal rewrite rules, and why starting permalinks with %category%, %tag%, or %author% is a really bad idea.

What is the Best Permalink Structure?

So, now that you know what permalinks are, how they work, and what the server performance issues are if you have a poor permalink structure, the next question you’ll have is – what actually is the best permalink structure?

OK, we’re going to go right back to that permalinks settings page:

Of course you don’t want to use default, but the second and third selections are what we call “date based permalinks”. You can go with day and name or month and name (or other variations). WordPress encourages date based permalinks, and that’s why they’re in the default options.

The whole problem with the rewrite rules are – the 11 extra rewrite rules don’t have to be added if your permalinks start with a unique random number. The random number helps distinguish the posts from the pages in the database. For example, if your permalink structure is /2011/05/15/sample-post – then WordPress knows that all your posts start with numbers (and it makes them easier to lookup via the rewrite rules). But if your permalinks are /%postname%/ (like so many people use), then the URL’s for posts and pages both just contain words, and like /sample-post and /sample-page. WordPress has to add 11 extra rewrite files for every single page in this case, so it knows that page isn’t one of your posts.

Date Based Permalinks: Let’s talk about date based permalinks for a second. Are date based permalinks the best to use? Well, they will solve the problem with WordPress and the performance issues involving all the extra rewrite rules. If you use date based permalinks and have hundreds or even thousands of pages you shouldn’t suffer performance issues. There are no significate SEO reasons not to use date based permalinks, but we’ll talk about that more below. Suffice it to say, using date based permalinks in WordPress is not a bad choice at all.

ID Based Permalinks: The often overlooked permalink setting is the fourth one “Numeric”. This is the /archives/%post_id% structure. This would result in a post being www.site.com/archives/123. This is seldom used because, as you can see, it contains no keywords in the URL at all.

As an alternative to date based permalinks you could use a custom permalink structure like this:
/%post_id%/%postname%

By using this structure, you get the post_id in the beginning (which satisfies the WordPress requirement of having the URL start with something numeric), and then you still get to use the keywords of the post title by adding postname after that.

It’s also what you see on a good majority of large non-WordPress websites as well. For example, Search Engine Watch URL’s for articles are formed like this:
searchenginewatch.com/article/1234567/article-name-goes-here

WordPress Permalinks and SEO

This whole business with “pretty permalinks” started years ago when people found out that having keywords in their URL gave an additional boost in search rankings. It started with people using simply /%postname as their permalink structure, but over time in some SEO circles it was found that /%category%/%postname% could also be beneficial. Some people swear by it.

About /%category%/%postname% and SEO: Our opinion on /%category%/%postname% is that if it once worked – don’t count on it anymore. The reason is that the Google Panda Update (also known as the Farmer update) has completely changed the game in SEO. What started at first as Google algorithm changes to filter the effects of low quality links in ranking, have now led to what we call “over-SEO” penalties.

The easiest way to explain this is – Google knows when you’re trying too hard, and when you are – you’ll get a penalty for it. Google has never liked tag or category pages, because they’re just yet another regurgitation of your existing posts, sliced and diced in different ways – with no additional original quality content. Why would they like you adding category names before the URL’s of bunches of posts in an attempt at better rankings? The category postname permalinks worked better when Google wasn’t specifically looking for people overdoing SEO (and now they are).

So, if you’re going to use category postname, just know that in a post Panda world – Google might not like it. That AND, if you do use it you’ll have the performance issues noted above.

About date based permalinks and SEO: Hardcore WordPress proponents push date based permalinks because they solve the performance issues, but since they’re (usually) not marketing people – they don’t always understand exactly why many people don’t like them.

Once you publish a post with a date in the URL – it’s there for good (unless you change your permalinks in the future, and redirect all those post). For a news based site, maybe you don’t care if your posts are dated – because date determines relevance. But if you write marketing material on your blog that you feel would be useful for years – you may not want to “date” it for fear in the future people would overlook it – because it was old (even though the information is still valid). Other people feel that when the date is in the URL Google may give newer articles preference, shown by the fact search results themselves contain dates, and the newer articles are always towards the top. Some argue that even with no date in the URL, Google still knows how old your content is from the XML sitemap or first time it was crawled and indexed.

Google uses more than 200 “ranking signals” in it’s algorithm when determining who comes up for what in search results. We have not seen evidence of using or not using a date based permalink affecting SEO in such a way to say it’s better or worse. It’s a personal preference, and it does solve any of the performance issues listed above.

About numeric permalinks and SEO: From a pretty permalink perspective, if you go with the default /archives/%post_id% you aren’t using any keywords, so it doesn’t help SEO at all. That’s why we prefer /%post_id%/%postname% – which gives you the best of both worlds. You get great SEO, without having to worry about any site performance issues.

Another side effect is, if you want to get indexed by “Google News” – they require you have a numeric identifier within your permalink structure at least 4 digits long to be indexed there (but either date based or numeric permalinks would be acceptible).

What’s the best permalink for SEO then?

In our opinion it’s either date based permalinks or /%post_id%/%postname%. If you’ve been using %postname% for years or %category%/%postname% and you have few enough pages where you don’t have performance issues – stick with what as long as you have no issues.

Permalinks and Speed

We talked about the performance issues you can encouter with poor permalink structures, and SEO benefits as well. It’s obvious that if you have a poor permalink structure AND more than 15-20 static pages in WordPress, you can start having site speed issues because of all the rewrite rules.

What we didn’t mention (up until now) was that this is how WordPress operates “out of the box” (without any caching). For example, if you’re using WP Super Cache your WP website is cached to static HTML files anyway. You might use WordPress with a CDN and a plugin – like W3 Total Cache. So if you were having performance issues because of poor permalink structure, you may be able to aleviate that just by caching your site or using a CDN.

What we can tell you is this – website speed is definitely a ranking factor that Google now uses. This year they also made available the Google Page Speed API, which many SEO and caching plugins for WordPress are now using.

So, when it comes to permalinks and speed, just make sure you’re not using the poor permalink structures above that cause performance issues. Then cache your site when possible, and use the Google Page Speed API tools in your caching and SEO plugins to make sure you’ll optimized as much as possible.

Conclusion on WordPress Permalinks

Hopefully you’ve learned a thing or two today, we know that our view on permalinks has changed over the years based on experience, updates to WordPress, and plugin functionality. As Otto wrote in his excerpt, future versions of WordPress may well fix the performance issues with static pages and rewrite rules, but at least for now you know what they are – and your options for best permalink structure.

Also consider visiting the Official WordPress: Using Permalinks page for detailed information on all the options available.

ALSO: We know for a fact that there will be people that read this post and say “see I KNEW WordPress wasn’t a CMS, Drupal and Joomla beat the s*$^ out of it…”. They will base that on the fact that with the permalink issue, you can’t create a lot of static pages without having performance issues.

Well, one thing we saved for yet another tutorial is – how to NOT USE WordPress pages at all for hierarchal or custom content, and instead using the WordPress 3.0+ feauture of custom post types and taxonomies. WordPress IS a fully functioning CMS – and you should probably read our How to Create Custom Post Types in WordPress tutorial next!

You might have been wondering what will be in the new release of WordPress 3.2, and this is a GREAT time to tell you about it, because beta #2 just came out. WP 3.2 should be available by the end of June (3 weeks or less, yay!).

WordPress 3.2 Requirements

The first thing that you should know is that there are some new “requirements” for WordPress 3.2. This is VERY important, as this is the first version of WordPress (that I can remember) in a LONG time that actually has server requirements (that you may or may not have). Check with your webhost to ensure that you have at least:

PHP 5.2.4 or greater
MySQL 5.0 or greater
mod_rewrite Apache module

Odds are – most of you probably do, but ‘somebody’ reading this post right now will not. So, submit a help desk ticket (if you don’t know where to look in your web hosting control panel or cpanel), and if you’re worried about the upgrade at all – just click the link at the bottom of this post for additional help from us.

What you need to know is that with the requirement of PHP 5.2.4 WordPress is official dropping support for PHP4 with WordPress 3.2. This means is your website is hosted on a server still using PHP 4 – your WordPress powered website will fail to work (if you upgrade to 3.2 when it comes out). But, if you fail to upgrade – you will miss important security patches (in WordPress) and be more succeptible to getting hacked.

How do I check my version of PHP?:

Actually iThemes has online PHP5 checker here. All you have to do is enter your URL, and it will tell you what version of PHP you are running:

Apparently, (as of this writing) we need to upgrade our version of PHP ourselves, even though what we have is compatible with the new WordPress 3.2 (but just barely).

How do I check my MySQL database server version?

Most web hosting control panels have a section for databases like this (and this is a cpanel version):

Click on the icon for “phpMyAdmin” as in the image above, and once the screen loads and it should tell you in the top right what your MySQL (server) version is like this:

You can see we’re running 5.1.52 on this hosting account, which is good enough for WP 3.2 (5.0+ is required).

Alternative Methods for checking PHP and MySQL versions: If for some reason you don’t have access to the web control panel for a WP website (but can get login to the dashboard as admin) there is another way to check if you’re PHP and MySQL ready for 3.2. Just install the LAMP version checker plugin, and it will tell you:

This of course, will not work if you have Windows web hosting (which most of you won’t).

If you have Hostgator web hosting (which we recommend), then you can scroll down the to bottom left sidebar and click “program versions” like this:

Guess what (to our own surprise) in our Hostgator test account, MySQL is WordPress 3.2 ready, but PHP actually is not (I guess we have to submit our own support ticket!):

WordPress 3.2 is faster

Lazy Loading: Improvements have been made on both the front end and the dashboard to make WordPresss load faster. Something called “PHP lazy loading” has been introduced – which is a feature of PHP 5. Basically – this is a functionality that allows specific resources to be loaded at the time it’s required (and not before).

Faster dashboard: There’s been some patching to the admin menu to make it load faster (and look sleeker):

You’ll see in the image above that it’s also a bit more obvious now how to expand and contract the admin sidebar.

Faster upgrades: The FTP functionality has been improved, so upgrading both plugins and WordPress itself in the future will happen more quickly too! Another improvement to the upgrade process is that in the past one-click upgrades of WordPress occurred as “full upgrade” (all files). Now, (and in the future) only modified or new files will be upgraded.

This has it’s pros and cons as we see it. One con is – if a file is damaged or infected, upgrading wordpress in the future won’t fix it (unless that file is new or updated in a new version of WP). Then again, it might not have fixed the issue anyway. One pro is, if you’ve updated core files, you don’t have to worry about them being overwritten (unless they are modified), and you can check which files have been modified before updating. But, that’s only for really custom installs.

WordPress Old Browser Notification

Once you upgrade to 3.2, when you visit the dashboard you’ll be notified if you’re using an “older browser” like this:

This is part of the Browse happy initiative run by WordPress, and you get the notice if you aren’t running at least Chrome 11, Firefox 4, Safari 5, Opera 11.10, or IE9. We run Firefox 3.6, so we’re just going to click the “dismiss” button so we don’t see that again – but it’s good they notify people of what’s available.

Full Screen Editing Mode

Some have called this “distraction free” writing mode, and whether you use the visual or HTML editor – the “full screen” editing mode is available if click the icon on the toolbar:

Basically, when you click that all the clutter is removed except for basic necessities:

The only necessities left are the ability to toggle from HTML to visual editor, and add a link or image (in HTML mode). In visual editing mode you get bold, italic, bullets, quotes, add or remove a link, and help. I think a lot of people will find this helpful, especially if they are at first intimidated by the WordPress dashboard and it’s options.

When you’re done editing all you have to do is click “exit fullscreen” to go back and publish your post.

The New 2011 Default WordPress theme

Last year WordPress announced that they would be released at least one free default theme per year (from now on) and last year’s was “2010″. If would only be fitting that this year’s is “2011″, and you have no idea how much it brings to the table.

WordPress “Post Formats”:

Once you activate the 2011 theme, the “Settings->Writing” page of the dashboard changes:

You’ll see a new dropdown called “default post format”, with options for standard, aside, link, gallery, status, quote, or image. You may not have heard about

You might want to read “How to Add Post Formats“, or Lisa Sabin-Wilson’s Post Formats Reference if you hack or design your own WordPress themes.

Header Options: The 2010 theme had a custom header image of 940×198. You could upload and crop an image from your compouter, or choose to use one of the default 8 provided images (or just rotate them randomly). The same options exists for the 2011 default theme, except the image size has been increased to 1000×288.

You can now also choose to display text (yes or no) in the header options, and choose the text color as well:

2011 Theme Options: What is completely new are the 2011 Theme admin options:

Theme options like this are something that you typically only saw in premium themes, and is something that has never been available in a WordPress default theme before now.

You can see in the image above you can now choose a light or dark color scheme, you can choose the default color for links, and you can even choose to have a left or right sidebar – or no sidebar at all.

About a month ago on the WordPress Development blog Lance Willett mentioned that there might be a change coming to allow “flexible header heights” in the 2011 theme (but it’s not in there yet). Also Matias mentioned on that same thread that four different options for showing and / or hiding the header image and / or text would be in the custom header options, but we didn’t see that either. Either one of those changes could make it into the final WordPress 3.2 release in the next 3 weeks.

WordPress 3.2 Upgrade Review Conclusion

When WordPress 3.2 official is released at the end of July you’re going to get a refreshed admin panel, faster loading admin and front end, a new default theme (2011) with cool admin theme options and post formats, and new “distraction free” full screen editing mode.

However, you will need to make sure that your web host support the new PHP code and MySQL database requirements (before you upgrade). We hope that this review has helped you become read, if you still need assistance with your upgrade – by all means Request a Quote, we’d be happy to help you with our WordPress consulting services.

Google announced today on their blog that you can add the Google +1 Button to your own website with some very simple code. So, here I am to show you how to customize your own WordPress theme to add it yourself!

Google makes it really simple with their new API, all you have to do is inside your WP dashboard just to go “Appearance”, and then “Editor” and click on the “footer.php” file (link is in the right sidebar).

Then just copy and paste the code before your closing body and html tags as in this image:

(click image for full size)

Then, choose where you want the button to appear, and add it in the appropriate place. For this website, we chose to add it only on full single post pages, so we clicked on “single.php” in the editor from the dashboard and added the single line of code like this right after the_content line (so it would appear after the post – like we wanted):

(click image for full size)

Where you put it is of course up to you entirely. According to the official WordPress post big sites like Huffington Post, Mashable, TechCrunch, Best Buy, Reuters, The Washington Post, Nordstrom, and Rotten Tomatoes are adding it as well. If you use the Facebook like button, why not have this one too (it could mean more search traffic from Google!).

Since I wrote my first post about datafeedr years back, a lot of things have changed. A lot of datafeed affiliate store products have comme and gone too, but datafeedr is still chugging along. The member’s area has been drastically overhauled, as well as the way you use the WordPress plugin to build affiliate stores. The number of programs you can use has been exponentially increased, and the product has matured more (then even I had realized) since it first came out. It’s a great way to make money with affiliate marketing.

If you visit the website homepage, you’ll find quick links to get your started, documentation, even video tutorials. The support forums have always been great, you can download the latest version of the plugin, and “the factory” is where you actually build your store.

Most of us that have been doing affiliate marketing for years belong to just about every affiliate program or affiliate house online. That’s because they all seem to have just one merchant you want to promote. Others are specific to a type of product, market, or even country or regional market. With datafeedr you get all the normal affiliate houses, like LinkShare, Clickbank, ShareASale, Buy.at, and Google Affiliate Network (doubleclick). But you also get ones like Affilliate Window, Avantgate, Affilinet, TradeDoubler, Digital River, and LinkConnector.

What is a Datafeed?

If you’re reading this you probably already know, but when a merchant (like Wal-Mart, Target, Newegg) signs up with an affiliate house (like say Commission Junction or Linkshare) they add all their products and links into the system. You in turn can (manually) find banner ads and links to products you can promote on your website. If somebody clicks and buys – you make a commission! The more you sell, the more you get.

Most merchants make their “datafeed” available, which is a text file listing of all their products and links. Sometimes in also includes images (sometimes not), sometimes descriptions – and you can often get it what we call a CSV “flat file” (spreadsheet format). You could use this to import into Excel, or hire a programmer to suck the results into your website, and use it how you want.

The problem all along has been that every retailer seems to use their own “format” for the datafeed file – there is NO standard format. The images (and sizes) are different, the names and placement of the columns are different, some have both long and short descriptions, some have none. Datafeeds are hard to deal with, messy – and to use them in your web site (if you’re not a programmer) is next to impossible.

What does datafeedr do?

Well, datafeedr.com is a service that gets all the (popular) datafeeds from 18 different affiliate houses, thousands of different datafeeds in fact. As of this write more than 6,000 merchants are supported, and more than 100 MILLION products are available through the service. You signup for the datafeedr service by purchasing a membership (which is monthly) for the number of websites you want to build with it.

They download the datafeed files from all (their supported merchants) and then normalize the data (they standardize them). Then in your members account you select the products and merchants you want in your store. Let’s say you have a store where you want to list electronics from Best Buy, Newegg, Tiger Direct, Wal-Mart, Target, and stores like that. Select all the products you want, and put them in the categories you want. Create a whole online store, format and set it up the way you want, you can take as little as an hour (or less), or a few days or more if you want more detail.

Then once you’re ready – you download and install the datafeedr WordPress plugin in your WordPress powered website. Once activated, you connect it to your datafeedr store with the connection key (supplied in the mebers section), and it imports your entire “store” into the designated section of your website. That’s it – instant affiliate website!

Does Datafeedr Really Make Money?

We have been reviewing, working with, and creating affiliate website products for a LONG time (going on 10 years now). Times have definitely changed, even in the last 6 months with Google and it’s now infamous “Panda” (or Farmer) update. What Google doesn’t like are affiliate product sites that have nothing more than regurgitated titles, images, and descriptions. But they certainly don’t mind quality affiliate sites, especially the ones that have good original content.

What does this mean for you? Datafeedr is a great product, and if you’re going to create an affiliate product “store” within your site to make money, and the have hundreds (or thousands) of products inside it, you DO NOT want these indexed by Google, unless you take the time to rename all the titles and redo all the descriptions (to make them original). Why? Because the same title and description already exists at the original merchant, and the last thing Google wants is for you to duplicate the page (duplicate content).

Our recommendation is to setup a robots.txt file blocking the store like this (google robots.txt):

Disallow: /store/*

where “/store/*” is the location of your datafeedr store. Then turn on the datafeedr “drip” feature, where the plugin actually creates a post set to your schedule (daily, weekly) – and you can choose to “publish” the post or make it a “draft”. We have been very successful over the years by dripping “drafts” out of the store, and then rewriting the titles and descriptions, and bringing traffic into the store that way. Google absolutely does not mind affiliate sites that are “thin affiliates” (little or no original content). Personally – we use this method with datafeedr on our sites, and it’s a great way to get free organic traffic and make passive streams of income. Of course, you could always either pay for traffic, or use Adwords to bid on clicks – and not have to worry about organic rankings at all – but you do have to have a budget for that.

Conclusion of our Datafeedr Review for 2011

If you’re going to built an affiliate store or affiliate website in WordPress, we recommend datafeedr. Click here for datafeedr pricing and membership details. It’s a product we’ve personally used for years. It works with any WordPress theme, every plugin we’ve ever installed, support is great – and if you drip a bunch of products and later discontinue the service, you can keep all your dripped posts (and the store) – you just won’t get updated products links. If you’re unsure, try it for a few months – we think you’ll be surprised at how good it actually is.

We give presentations for WordPress and Small Business at various meetups and networking groups in the local and regional areas. Below is the bulk of the presentation we give, with both the slide bullet points, and then some commentary (since you won’t get all the live dialogue). Please feel free to use the comments at the very for questions, and if you are interested in our WordPress consulting services, please Request a Quote.

Here’s the presentation slide deck from WordPress Ann Arbor:

What is WordPress?

• Why Is It SO Popular?
• What Is a CMS?

WordPress is popular because it’s a highly intuitive CMS (Content Management System) for websites. By using both themes and plugins, you can easily configure and maintain your own website (in most cases) without a developer or designer.

A CMS is software that allows you manage a website and it’s assets dynamically, without the need for static (individual) web pages. You can create, edit, and manage web pages, and images – without the need for web development software.

How do I get WordPress?

One of two ways:

WordPress.com is a free blog service

• signup for: websitename.wordpress.com
• can’t modify theme code
• have to pay to modify CSS code
• can’t install plugins or themes they don’t already have
• has paid upgrades (like vanity domain names)
• don’t have to pay for hosting
• maintained for Automattic company, not WordPress community
• limited customization – but nearly unbreakable

WordPress.org is free downloadable software

• requires web hosting
• maintained by WordPress community (which includes Automattic)
• can install any plugins or themes you want
• highly intuitive, fairly easy learning curve
• unlimited customization potential
• you break it – you fix it

But Isn’t WordPress for Blogging?

WordPress started in 2004 as “blogging” software (online journal), and that’s how many people still perceive it. It is (today) a fully fledged CMS system, and maturing more with each release. It is in use at websites receiving millions of daily pageviews (like Engadget.com), and at many high profile organizations, such as eBay, New York Times, CNN, UPS, General Motors, Best Buy, Forbes, National Geographic, and more…

Can I Really Create and Manage My Own Website?

• WordPress is Free
• Thousands of Free Themes
• Thousands of Free plugins
• What’s Your Time Worth?

Yes, you can create and manage your own WordPress powered website for free. You can use a free theme, you can use all free plugins, and depending on your level of technical skill, you can have a new website up and running in very little time.

Having said that, you might have to search awhile to find a free theme that doesn’t look “amateurish”, and you might need to be a slight bit tech savvy to upload your own logo, and customize it slightly. Also, some business owners are so busy – that they simply don’t have the time to learn how to use and setup WordPress for a website (as easy as it is). If you’re too busy already making money to create and manage your website, pay to have it done by a reputable expert. If you don’t have the capital to invest, then you’re stuck investing your own time.

How Much Money Will I Need?

• WordPress.com is free (but inflexible)
• Most businesses “self-host”
• requires a domain name and web hosting account
• What you spend beyond that is unique to your business needs
• DO NOT put your website LAST on your list of expenditures

If you go with the WordPress.com free website, you’ll be up and running in minutes – with no cost unless you purchase an upgraded feature (like a vanity URL). Most businesses however, require additional functionality that only “self-hosted WordPress can offer”.

You can get a domain name for around $10-12 (for 1 year registration). We recommend registering domains names with GoDaddy.com, because after using them for our own domain names for more than 10 years – they have been nothing but excellent. We can’t however say the same about their web hosting (or other) services.

You can get a web hosting account for about $10-15/mo. We recommend web hosting with HostGator.com. Since we fix hacked and infected blogs nearly every week, we have extreme experience with over a hundred web hosts, and HostGator has always been the best in both support and number of websites compromised. We do not recommend Bluehost, Dreamhost, or GoDaddy, as these are the #1, #2, and #3 webhosts we see with infected WordPress websites most often.

Beyond the basics of a domain name and web hosting, the best thing we can say as to the amount of money you’ll need is “your mileage may vary” (depending on your business needs, and the amount of money you have to spend). If you’re a law firm you might find that the free themes aren’t as professional as you’d like, and you might see out a “premium” (paid) theme that has high end graphics (and support). If you’re a jeweler, you might want to actually have a shopping cart in your website, a bar or meeting place might need a “list of events”, and a school or organization might need some type of subscription or members functionality. There are premium (paid) plugins you can purchase to address any one of these scenarios (and more). At the end of this presentation will be a list of recommended premium themes and plugins.

Beyond themes and plugins, you may have to (at some point) hire some help. This could occur if your website doesn’t look exactly the way you want, or if it doesn’t do exactly what you want. It could also happen if your website breaks (and you can’t fix it). Whatever you do, don’t put your website last on your list of (business) expenditures. If you had a physical brick and mortar store you would at least need to pay for rent or mortgage, utilities, insurance, and maintenance and upkeep. You need to view your website as important as a physical building, and invest in it’s upkeep and maintenance accordingly.

Preventative Website Maintenance Tips

• Offsite backups
• Update WordPress regularly
• Update Plugins regularly
• Remove unused plugins
• Use Basic Security measures

It’s important that you treat your website with as much care as you would your house or your car. If you’re using your website for business, then you intend on making money with it, and you intend on investing time and money into it. If someone broke into your physical business building – you would have to spend money in time and repair to fix it. You must realize the same would be true if something happened to your website.

Use a backup service (offsite if you can). If you’re a little bit technical, read the official WordPress Backups page.

There are free plugins like WP-DB Manager, but some of them (like that one) only backup your database, and not all the files in your website.

WP-DB Backup manages to get a snapshot of your site, but will get get not only wordpress and your database, but all the (other) files in your website (you may not want). It has an option to email a zip file to you, but if your site is big – this may not work.

A more sensible backup solution may be the Automatic WordPress Backup plugin. The plugin is free, but the web site backup is stored “in the cloud” in Amazon S3 storage (which you have to pay for).

You can see why many people just choose to purchase a plugin based service for backups, that will both backup and restore your website – should disaster occur.

Such as Backup Buddy, or VaultPress.

Once you have offsite backups, you can feel confident in updating WordPress and all plugins regularly – because if something bad happens you can revert to the previous version of your website (rollback). You should also remove any unused plugins.

Popular security plugins that anyone could install and easily configure are Login Lockdown, WordPress Firewall 2, or the recent and VERY popular BulletProof Security.

For more in depth WordPress security information, try reading our WordPress Security Guide.

How Do I find a WordPress Expert?

• search
• forums or groups
• outsourcing websites
• recommendations

There are many ways to find a qualified WordPress expert, you could Google search until you found one with the skills required for your job or project. You could also ask questions or hang out where you can find WordPress experts, like the WordPress Tavern Forums. You could take a recommendation from a web developer or tech person you know, or go to one of the popular outsourcing or freelance websites.

How Do I know if my WordPress guy IS AN expert?

We have heard so many “I got burned by my previous guy” stories from clients it’s not even funny. If we had a nickel for every one. Typically in each case, the client didn’t ask (or talk to) any references, and believed all the up front promises of the purported expert, and then once they got the money – they didn’t (or couldn’t) deliver.

The first thing you want to do is ask for examples of work from the person or company you want to hire. Then, ask for the references and contact information specifically for 3-4 of them and see what kind of response you get. If they say something like “they won’t allow me to give out their contact info”, or “that was when I was with another company” – and they want to skirt around the issue by giving you their “preferred contacts” (who may not even be real clients) – run don’t walk from this expert. They either never did work on that site, or they know they wouldn’t get a good reference from that person.

Next, give your expert a clear explanation of what you want. In return expect a run down of how they’ll do it (not, “sure we can do that”). Make them tell you HOW they will deliver your project, from techniques, to timeline, and cost.

Then, get an estimate of hours, and find out how much is required to start, and if you pay more during the project or the remainder at the end. Find out if they have a work contract. If it’s important to you, demand to talk to them over the phone – and make sure that their communication skills are enough for you to work with them.

How Much Do I Pay a WordPress expert?

• You get what you pay for
• Rates run from $10/hr to $200/hr
• Compare costs to any other skilled trade
• Differences are from coaches to coders
• If you want custom work, you pay a custom price

This is a good time to state that a great majority of people think that they can hire just anyone to work on their website. It’s crazy, because you wouldn’t just go to the bad section of town and hire some guy on the street corner to paint your car, or change the locks on your front door. And yet, time and time again we find people hiring some guy in India for $10/hr to completely setup their website. You don’t want a minimum wage plumber, an electrician with a 6th grade education, or an accountant or lawyer that can’t speak English. If your website is for business – why on earth wouldn’t you at least want someone that is both knowledgeable, and an expert at doing it for you?

Here’s something to think about, we had a job estimate last week where the client had paid a previous developer 40 hours worth of work to create a basic WordPress website. Before telling us that, he asked what we would’ve charged to create the same basic website – and we said we could’ve created what they had as-is in about 35 minutes or less (it was a basic theme with no customization and a single contact page). Even though our hourly rate is a little more than double what he paid his previous developer, he paid less by the hour, but paid for 40 hours of work (and still didn’t get what he wanted). Get an estimate up front, get it in writing with all the details of what you need.

Realize that there are differences in the levels of knowledge between WordPress “experts”. Some may be great “coaches” with enough experience to help you do basic customizations, including installing plugins and themes. They may not have enough experience to actually make heavy coding changes, or design customizations. Find out up front how much they know, and whether they would make a great “coach” or a great “coder”. Also, just because they can setup the website, does not mean they know anything about marketing, ads, search optimization, or security. Ask all the questions you can in advance.

We run into a lot of people looking for “custom work”. WordPress can do a lot out of the box, and there are plugins allowing you to do even more. But those plugins have specific features “out of the box”, and if you have unique needs beyond that – you may need some custom coding to get exactly what you want. We mention this because we get people (all the time) that don’t understand how much custom work costs (because of the hours involved). If you buy a suit “off the rack” – you pay a cheaper price. Get a kitchen from the showroom floor, most of it’s pre-designed. If you need a tailor or an architect – expect to pay good money for it! The same is true of websites. Get the best guy you can, make sure the work is done right, get exactly what you want – just don’t expect to get all this for $10/hr!

PEOPLE ARE JUDGING YOU!

• first impressions are everything
• you have about 5 seconds time
• it’s like a job interview
• are you trustworthy?
• can YOU do what I want?
• is what I want within 2 clicks?


The cold hard facts are everyone judges a book by it’s cover. You don’t like to think that, but it’s true. In your day to day life everything you encounter is based on judgements and snap decisions that you (and everyone else) makes in 5 seconds or less. You judge things by how they look, how they smell, how they act or appear, and what others think of them. Does this make sense to you? Because if it does, then you know that first impressions are EVERYTHING.

You have about 5 seconds time (on your website) to impress visitors before they run away (and sometimes they do before that). It’s like a job interview, new users are looking you up and down like a job prospect at an interview. Are you trustworthy? Can you do what they want? Can they find what they need within your website in just one or two clicks?

We use a lot of analogies with people in regards to websites, because (to be quite frank) most people are cheap bastards. We can’t blame anyone for being frugal, but why is it that a business that would spend thousands of dollars on a yellow pages ad for 10 years, not want to investest (one time) a few thousand dollars to have a spectacularly designed website? If you would spend money on a big shiny sign, slick business cards, a mailer campaign, television or radio – then why wouldn’t you want to invest the APPROPRIATE amount in your website design? Think about the best websites you’ve ever been to, that looked the best, and were the easiest to use…and then think about your own website. Does it match up?

You may not know this, but quality of design is an indicator of trust (proven in usability studies). In other words, it’s just like a job prospect. If a new applicant came to your business and interviewed for a job in shabby clothes, speaking bad English, and needing a bath – you probably made your choice before the interview was even over. I sure hope that your website doesn’t give the same impression to new visitors, because it’s there to attract new business – not turn it away.

Needs of a Small Business Online

• listing of services
• selling products (e-commerce)
• blogging
• social media engagement
• contact forms
• invoicing
• generating leads
• SEO (getting found)
• email marketing
• advertising



The needs of a small businesses are quite common when it comes to websites. All business websites need some type of listing for their services, and some actually need to sell products. Many business owners have a blog (within their website) for promotion of the brand. Nearly all markets can benefit from some type of social media engagement (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn). WordPress has great free (and paid) plugins for contact forms, invoicing, SEO, email marketing, and advertising (should you choose to sell ad space). WordPress is popular because it has both free and paid plugins to address nearly all these needs.

Listing Your Services

• write in depth descriptions
• don’t put non-relevant services on the same page
• think off each service page as a “target”
• know your keywords in advance
• don’t OVER-SEO
• don’t forget the homepage target

A business website serves many functions. The first is to actually “get found” in the search engines, and if the search crawlers can’t figure out exactly what your business does, or what all your services (or products) are – you’re not going ot come up in search for anything.

One key thing to remember is that you should write great content with in depth descriptions. If you have multiple services (that are not completely relevant), then break them up into multiple services pages. Think of each services page as a “target” for a search engine visitor. Write great content that would not only make them want to use your business when they view the page, but that would also tell a search crawler the most about your business.

More often than not a business owner will think that they know exactly what “keywords” to use in their website. A quick trip over to the Google Keyword Tool might just change your perspective on that a bit. More importantly, once you know some good keywords to use, don’t go overboard with them. Use them in natural language context in your title, headings, and content. You can definitely “over-SEO” your webpages if you try to hard.

One thing most business owners tend to overlook is some descriptive text on your homepage actually stating descriptively what your business is about. If your domain name or business name isn’t keyword specific – a search crawler is going to have a hard time figuring out what you do (if you don’t tell them).

Selling Products (e-commerce)

• know your requirements first
• find the best solution (using WordPress or not)
• have a dedicated maintenance person
• be secure
• cover yourself legally

Selling products online is completely different than just having an informational website. The best thing you could possibly do is write down all the requirements for your online e-commerce in advance.

• how much do you anticipate selling?
• are they digital or physical goods?
• will you need a merchant processor, or will paypal work?
• how many products do you have?
• what shipping methods will you use?
• who will maintain your online store?
• how much will you have to worry about security?
• what’s your return policy?
• do you have the appropriate legal disclaimers?
• How is inventory maintained now (Excel, Quickbooks, another system?
• What accounts / receivable interface is necessary?

Once you know your own requirements, it will be much easier selecting the best way to do e-commerce. It should be quite clear if WordPress will work (or not). For instance the WP e-Commerce plugin is great, but does require some setup. You might also need to upgrade to get the appropriate shipping modules. Cart 66 is easy to use, and under $100 for a single site license, but it doesn’t yet have a CSV import tool. Then again, it is highly integrated with Amazon S3, Gravity forms, IDevAffiliate, Contact Contact, and MailChimp.

Blogging for Small Business

• don’t let it be a missed opportunity
• position yourself as an expert
• grow in the search engines
• use it to populate social media
• give away knowledge as your loss leader
• Keep people engaged via updates
• Use examples, case studies, and testimonials

Many small businesses say “I just want a standard website, we don’t need a blog”, but they couldn’t be more wrong. They may not “need” a blog to have a business website, but not having one is a “missed opportunity” for marketing. Blogging is a way to position yourself as an expert, it’s part of branding. It’s a way to make you human to your customers, and build trust. Every single blog post is a new seed in the search engine lottery, and if you don’t use social media frequently (like Facebook and Twitter), you can auto-post your blog post links to those accounts.

A static website is just that – static. It doesn’t change much, and people only visit when they need to lookup your service. A blog keeps people coming back over and over again, even when they aren’t looking at your products or services. You can keep them subscribed via email, RSS feeds, comments, forums, SMS text message, or through social media. If you’re not good at blogging, simply using recent customers examples of work, case studies, or testimonials is enough – or even highligh specials or new products when they are released. You are YOUR OWN PR opportunity!

What Plumber Would You Call?

When we gave this presentation live at WordPress Ann Arbor we showed some examples of local business websites that we found on the first page of Google. When we first looked, what we were trying to do was find examples of quality websites (on the first page of Google), but what we found instead were these examples.

For the first batch we googled “ann arbor plumber” and we found these 3 websites in Google page 1:



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When we did this live, we asked for good and bad things about each website. The image above is actually the entire homepage for this business. As you can see the print is entirely too small, the masters plumbers license # is buried in the tiny text, and the whole thing is too hard to read. It’s like somebody scanned in a bad business card.



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This website is a much better example, at least the phone number is in the header, and the master plumber license # is plainly visible in the left sidebar. The layout isn’t bad, but there is a bit of everything and the kitchen sink on the homepage, when it could be more of “call Mitch” with categorized links to all the information on inner pages. Then again – it’s better than the last example.



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Even though this example doesn’t have the greatest design – the funny part is it has better design “because it’s lacking”. Meaning, it’s not cluttered, and the whitespace actually helps it. Your eyes can focus front and center on the phone number, 24 hours a day (although that should be bigger) and the fact that they’ve been in business 150 years. Rather than listing every single service they offer on the homepage, merely listing “heating”, “air conditioning” and “plumbing” are enough.

What Painter Would You Hire?

Next we’ll look at a couple of web sites for local painters, we just googled the phrase “ann arbor painter” to find a couple.



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When we showed the website above to the audience, the first thing they said was “why doesn’t the website look like it has anything to do with painting?”. Another commented that there was a big honking iPad where something about painting should’ve been. Funny thing is, we used this example to show that with the navbar wrapped around in the top header, and the text overlapping the images – clearly the designer of this website hadn’t tested it in all browsers (and didn’t know these errors existed). On this site although the “Request an estimate now” button was nice, the phone number was too small, and “painting company” in the logo was so small – it was barely noticeable that this was a painting company at all.



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for the Pinnacle painter, the first everyone said was – where’s the phone number? That’s a major blunder, not having it in the top of the website. I guess the focus was on the free estimate, which was small in the header, and the poorly styled form in the body area wasn’t much better. But, at least on this website you can readily tell that they are painters.

Who’s the Most Reputable Lawyer?

When this screen came up and I asked “who’s the most reputable lawyer”, it sure got some groans from the crowd, and that was before we even showed the first website. I guess that lawyers can have that effect on people (lol). For these websites we simple looked at the first page of Google for “ann arbor lawyer”.



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Everyone in the room thought that the website above had been created in 1995, because it looked so outdated. Being dated dates your business. Another person asked why it showed the building and not the actual lawyers. This isn’t exactly the quality website you’d expect from a professional attorney.



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For the the lawyer website above, one person asked again “where’s the pictures of the lawyers”, and two or 3 others “what’s all that green garbage”? I don’t think if that attorney would’ve been in the same room they would’ve been as honest – but they’re right. What the heck does all that green artwork have to do with legal work in Ann Arbor? I have to give him credit, at least the phone is big and visible, and there’s a big “click to email me” link. It’s too bad there’s so much other wasted space on the page.



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Out of all the websites we looked at, this was not only the best Ann Arbor lawyer / attorney website, this was the best overall. It shows actual people, phone numbers, an “e-mail our attorneys” button, it was professional, professionally designed, and well laid out and easy to read.

Which Accountant Would You Hire?

So we tried to find good examples of local accountants on the first page of google searching for “ann arbor accountant”, and this is what we found (instead)…



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In this website, you can see – there is no visible phone number, and while the website is ok, it’s very basic. There just isn’t much to it, there’s a lot more to be desired here.



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This website had a LOT of people saying “what they heck is going on?”. It’s just too much text, too busy, too small, too outdated, no phone number – just one of the worst examples of a small business website any of us had ever seen.



Believe it or not, the website above was listed on the first page of google, even though it was down). I guess they didn’t pay their Yahoo hosting bill. This is an example of a website you clearly don’t want to be.

Which Pizza Would You Order?

The next websites we found on the first page of Google looking for “ann arbor pizza”.



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This first pizza website had everyone saying “WHO IS IT”? Mainly because the only place the name appears is on the logo (and it’s too small). My comment was, with the huge big read area in the header – why didn’t they put the name and phone number there? All in all, this website is way too busy, and the sizes and proportions of things are all out of whack. Sure, you know they sell pizza, but does the pizza need to be 500x bigger than the phone number and name of the business?



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The pizza place above was known by most everyone in the room – they all said it was one of the best they ever had. If I had not heard that, I would’ve thought (based on the website) it was just some hole in the wall. Mainly because the website looks like a badly scanned business card and menu with the most important thing (the phone number) at the bottom of the page. One of the main comments here was, business owners have to understand that the yellow pages are useless, and Google is the new yellow pages. Invest a few bucks in a web site, because that’s how everyone finds you first in this day and age.



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Even though the pizza place above is kind of a mish-mash of design gone wrong, at least there’s some social media, an “order online now” button, and location finder all there right on the very top of the homepage. With addition of the social media icons, they seem to be the only local pizza place that “gets the Internet”.

Examples of Good Small Business Websites

Again, our initial intention when finding those websites was to find some good examples of a small business website, and right after we went through those – that’s exactly what someone in the audience asked (and if we had an example or two that we had done). So we fired up a browser and…



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The website is a great example because you immediately know what the business is, and the logo stands out. You can see right away they’re on Twitter and Facebook (which is how they stay connected with fans and racers), and the last posts are featured. You can get to exactly what you need fast, with photos, results, rules, and schedule in the top navigation.



click image above for full size

The image above is another great example, because it’s professional design, just enough whitespace to not be cluttered, and you can easily and quickly see exactly what this business is about, and where to get exactly the information you need.

What have we learned?

• Have an extermely visible “Call to Action”
• Look as professional as possible
• Highlight your strengths
• Don’t have a “cluttered” website
• Is your message “5 seconds or less”?

Your website should solicit some type of action on pages where you expect it. Whether it’s “call me”, “email me”, “contact me”, “get this free report”, or “free estimate now”. Your website should be as professional as possible in both layout and design, and your homepage should immediately highligh your strengths. Don’t have a design so cluttered that people can’t get what they need quickly, and be sure that people can find what they want just by glancing for a few seconds or less.

Are You Getting Conversions?

• Is your website bringing in visitors?
• Are those visitors converting to sales?
• What can you do to get more traffic?
• What can you do to convert more sales?

The main reason many business owners overlook (or are frustrated about) their website is that it isn’t brining in any traffic. You can hire content writers, marketing experts, or SEO gurus to beef up the traffic, but you still need the basics we already talked about. And all the traffic in the world isn’t important if you aren’t somehow converting that to sales.

Thing about what your website is currently doing with the traffic you are getting. Is it converting into sales? Do you now how and where? Do you know how to get it to convert to MORE sales? Be sure to have at least basic statistics or analytics installed to capture the information about your visitors, how long they stayed, where they came from, etc. Study this data to learn more about how people are using your website.

Does Your Website have ROI?

• Every business owners wants ROI
• If you don’t spend (time or money), no ROI
• ROI is NOT manufactured overnight
• You get OUT of it what you put INTO it

Every business owners wants a return on their investment (ROI). You wouldn’t have a website if you didn’t want it to do something. That “something” is MAKE MONEY (in one form or another). One side to that coin is, if you don’t invest in your website (time and money) – don’t expect any payoff. That, AND you can’t manufacture ROI overnight – you build it over time (like ANY business).

Go BEYOND your website

• Spend time doing external promotion
• Network in local meetups and groups
• Answer questions in forums
• Connect in forums
• CALL PEOPLE
• Connect traditional media to your website

You can get more worth out of your website simply by going beyond it. Don’t just put your website on brochures and business cards. Use it for networking, information, your signature of a forum profile, in social media, or even physical business networking situations. Go BEYOND your website and make it work for you!

Can We Help Your Small Business?

If you’d like to find out if we can help your small business – please, by all means Request a Quote Today!