Do’s & Dont’s for Your Site

There are a lot of things you should do and there are even more you should definitely NEVER do.

Do’s

- Use a clean and easy on the eyes color scheme without any dramatic contrasts.

- Use only readable fonts. Arial, Georgia and Times New Roman are often regarded as the best all around web safe and easy to read fonts.

- Make sure your menu is simple and easy to understand.

- Make sure to optimize images so they’re at a lower resolution (72 is fine for the web) and only the size needed. If you need a 300×100 pixel graphic don’t upload a 1200×800 pixel graphic.

Dont’s

- Never assume just because you like something that your audience will.

- DO NOT EVER USE A WEB INTRO. Never block the user from the content. It has been proven time and time again that people do not want to see a web intro when trying to get to your content. They’re more likely to click back than to click skip. Instead you might use an intro video within the home/landing page that a user may optionally click on.

- Never have sound (of any kind) automatically start when a visitor first reaches your site. This should always be optional.

- Never use flashing text or graphics.

- Never block content with ads. Ads are fine as long as they’re non-intrusive. Blocking a page or video and making a user watch an ad first can only be gotten away with if you’re a huge authoritative site like YouTube that can afford to alienate users. But, still… is it ethical?

- Avoid using Flash as much as possible.

Enjoy!

Thanks, Bryan

Security Time

I wish we didn’t live in a world where people were out to get you, but we do. It may not be personal, but owning and running a website exposes you to the world. And there are a lot of spammers, scammers, con-artists, hackers and criminals out their looking for exploits.

WordPress, with how popular it is and how many 3rd party scripts are involved make it an easy target. There are a number of things you can do to harden WordPress.

Having the right hosting and WordPress installed professionally is a great first step.

A professional install includes:

- A strong database password used
- A different username than admin set
- Having security keys and salts added
- A different database table prefix than wp_ set

This is all done in a manual install that 1-click installs do not offer.

There are also some wonderful security plugins to consider:

- Secure WordPress: Tightens up some basics like hiding your WordPress version.

- Bad Behavior: Blocks spam attempts. WARNING – This is a very strict plugin that can block some good things like open id logins and shopping cart apis.

- Restrict Login By IP: If you have no need or intention of allowing people to register for your site and only you need to login this is a great plugin. WARNING – IPs change often so make sure you know how to use FTP to edit your .htaccess file or you’ll lock yourself out of your admin.

- SABRE: For those that do allow registrations this is a great plugin with many options to help you block spam registrations.

Enjoy!

Thanks, Bryan

Tools for Development & Design

When it comes to developing and designing your website you’re not left alone in the dark. Even for complete beginners there are many tools and resources to ease the overall learning curve and greatly help you to improve productivity.

First, we’ll start with the browser. Three great browsers that I recommend for development and overall web surfing in general are:

- Firefox
- Chrome
- Safari
- Note about Internet Explorer: I do not recommend this browser for any reason. This is poorly designed software that is neither secure nor respectably standards compliant by web industry standards like the above three browsers. 99% of all browser specific issues occur within IE where every other browser manages to display the same website beautifully.

The only reason to use IE is to check and see that nothing is broken to appease those that still use the browser. We try and educate people the best we can and we hope that people will continue to stop supporting IE until it no longer dominates the browser market. Until then we will support IE within reason. But, when we have to compromise design and function (to bring the best in modern web design) is where we draw the line.

Firefox comes with a personal favorite add-on of mine, Firebug and all three natively support Inspect Element.

With Inspect Element you can simply right-click on any area of your website and gain more info about the code of that specific section and make live test edits (that only you can see) and troubleshoot and style your site before actually implementing them in your theme options:

Design > Custom CSS
http://cyberchimps.com/question/pro-custom-css/

For more advanced users we can also make hard coded changes to the actual template files, framework (HTML) or even edit the PHP, add JavaScript and so on with a child theme:

http://cyberchimps.com/question/child-themes-support/

Using either of these techniques you will never have to actually modify template files or add to your stylesheet of the main theme files. Meaning your changes will be safe upon upgrading (which still very much should be done correctly regardless).

For graphics editing I love Photoshop (and Illustrator too). But, for web graphics all you’ll ever need is Photoshop. However, if you don’t already know you’ll soon find out that Photoshop is very expensive software. A wonderful and completely free alternative is GIMP:

http://www.gimp.org/

Which can help you design logos or create beautiful and professionally prepared and sized slides for your slider:

http://cyberchimps.com/forum-topic/slides-best-practice/

One amazing tool I use for precision both in web and graphics design is Screen Calipers.

The default WordPress Visual (WYSIWYG – What You See Is What You Get) editor is plenty powerful already to help you style your pages and posts. However, what you see in the editor isn’t always what you get in the page/post (as many of you know).

It’s the same issue that occurs when using web design software like Dreamweaver. It’s not 100% precise and involves a lot of guess work. People will always be smarter than computers when it comes to certain things, and this is definitely one of them. So, once you get more comfortable and any time you add code to pages/posts you need to anyways, I recommend always using HTML mode.

Learn CSS | Learn HTML

Enjoy!

Thanks, Bryan

Hi Everyone,

Feed Me Ideas

This week I’m reaching out looking for your feedback on just what tips you’d like to see on Tip of the Week.

(If you haven’t been reading Tip of the Week and are unfamiliar checkout old Tip of the Week posts here and to keep up with the latest, make sure to subscribe.)

What would you like to learn?

What would you like to improve?

Comment with your ideas below.

(please note that this is not the place for feature or design suggestions, Tip of the Week is about improving your web knowledge and skills)

Thanks, Bryan

Hosting Matters

Whether you’re looking for optimal speed and performance or to make sure you get the right hosting so that your website even works at all in the first place, the host you choose matters.

You want to avoid Windows servers and you want to avoid small company web hosts as you risk the possibility of a high downtime percentage and worse, that they don’t keep everything up-to-date like PHP.

So, I have some recommendations for you of some really great hosts that also help you support us by signing up through us:

- CoolHandle
Offers more advanced hosting options and packages for those that intend on having a huge amount of traffic.

- BlueHost (the very same host that WordPress themselves recommend)
The perfect host for 90% of sites.

Enjoy!

Thanks, Bryan

Design Your Logo

You don’t need to be a corporation or fast food joint to need a logo. You also don’t need to be a pro to design your own logo. Whether you’re just an artist, musician, club, sports team, blog whatever… you need a logo.

A logo ties a site together making it feel complete and allows your readers, customers, clients, visitors of any kind to easily identify with you. Be it through your website or Facebook, Twitter or any other social profile you should carry a signature image.

Build Your Logo

Use a free online logo generator. Something like Cool Text.
(note that it’s very easy to make an ugly logo if you overdo the effects, subtlety is the key)

Design Your Logo

If you don’t have Photoshop or Illustrator which are very expensive programs, you can use GIMP (Mac users see here). Find a great tutorial for designing a simple text logo in GIMP here.

Have Your Logo Professionally Designed

And of course, should you need your logo professionally designed, checkout 99designs. And of course we offer logo design ourselves.

Enjoy!

Thanks, Bryan

There’s Probably a Plugin for That!

With 17,833 plugins and counting there is a plugin for just about every feature, customization, enhancement, optimization and security measure you can think of.

Here’s the easiest way to add a plugin and some tips on plugins to choose (choose wisely):

- First, Back it Up!.

- I strongly recommend becoming familiar with FTP as a safety measure. Should you get a white screen of death you’ll want to immediately delete the plugin you just installed out of the plugins folder, wp-content/plugins. If you’re unfamiliar of how to connect to your files and folders with FTP please check with your host.

- Inside your WP admin, go to Plugins > Add New > Enter a Keyword or Two and Search Plugins.

- Before installing, click on Details and check that it’s compatible with the latest WordPress version. Check that it has a popular rating and that people generally agree that it works well. Note, sometimes plugins are abandoned, but are still fully compatible with all WordPress versions so if for example it says it’s only compatible up to WP 2.9 it could still work without any issues.

- When you’ve found a promising plugin Click Install Now > Click OK > Then Click Activate.

- Depending on the plugin, it may now need to be configured further within it’s own settings page. This will usually be found under Settings, Plugins or Tools.

CAUTION
Not all plugins play nice together or with our themes. There are any number of possible issues.

Some Plugins I Recommend

W3 Total Cache – Minifies and caches your code and pages for quicker loading.
Warning: This is a very advanced plugin that required fine tuning and often does not play nice with other plugins. If ever you’re adding CSS or other updates to your site and they don’t seem to be taking effect you need to clear the W3 Total Cache.

All in One SEO Pack – Automates the most basic of SEO optimizations.

Google XML Sitemaps – Creates and submits a sitemap.xml file to search engines.

Bad Behavior – Block bad bots, spam and other junk from your site.

Secure WordPress – Some basic security measures to harden your WordPress install.

Contact Form 7 – Add a contact form to your contact page.

Theme My Login – Incorporate user registration and sign in into your theme.

bbPress – Add a forum to your site.

Widget Logic – Let’s you control what widgets show on what pages.

WP Touch – Make sure your site looks good on mobile devices.

So, so many more plugins to checkout…

Enjoy!

Thanks, Bryan

Back it Up!

Using WordPress and web design in general is a constant progression. Technology will always continue updating, bugs will be fixed, security holes patched and innovations reached. But, from unexpected upgrade errors to server outages with your host and really for safekeeping and your own peace of mind you need to routinely back EVERYTHING up.

Specifically for WordPress and CyberChimps you need to backup all your files and folders, database and CyberChimps settings. This can be a tedious and daunting process if you do not how to use FTP or MySql going in the first time. I do recommend manually backing up all of your stuff, but this is something you’ll need to check with your host on. Also, many hosts already backup all of your stuff.

However, I’ll instruct some easy and more automated ways to manage your backups.

- Install the BackUpWordPress plugin. This will take care of backing up your important files, folders and database. I recommend setting automatic backups for once a week. (Quick tip to install: go to Plugins > Add New > Search BackUpWordPress and install and activate with ease.)

- Also, you’ll want to backup your CyberChimps settings often. From Appearance > [THEME NAME] Options > Import / Export > Export Settings you’ll want to copy all your settings out and save to TextEdit or Notepad. If you don’t care to use either of those you could always email yourself the settings. Just compose an email to your own email, make sure there’s nothing in the email but your settings and send and archive. (Improvements to the ease of backing up settings will come.)

- When upgrading/updating for the first time, please read How to Upgrade for more tips.

Enjoy!

Thanks, Bryan

I’m starting a new series of blog posts called Tip of the Week where I will offer easy and practical tips that might often go overlooked on SEO, marketing, design and so on for your website.

SEO-friendly URLs

The default permalink structure for WordPress adds no SEO benefit, and is neither user or marketing friendly.

To have your URLs go from:

http://website.com/?p=123

to:

http://website.com/kittens-and-puppies-for-sale/

follow these simple steps:

- Log into your WordPress admin
- Go to Settings > Permalinks
- Set your structure to Post name and save

Enjoy!

Thanks, Bryan