Microsite – What’s It?
Showing posts with label wordpress website design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wordpress website design. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
Thursday, November 20, 2014
Few good Tricks To Improve Your WordPress Theme
Improve your WordPress Themes
In WordPress, the “Themes” play a vital part in making one’s site look unique and impressive. To that fact, there are thousands of themes available for the users to choose from and download, these are either offered for free or for a premium. However, did you know all these themes can be further tweaked in order to get better optimization, features or customization?
Well, let’s have a look at few simple yet effective tweaks that can be done to your WordPress themes, to offer better and safer experience to your website visitors.
Theme Images
Images are the primary part of most themes; they are on the logos, the backgrounds, icons and so on. However, WordPress theme developers sometimes fail to realize that their high resolution/high quality images are actually doing more bad to the theme users than good.
How? A high resolution image may make the theme look very pretty and luring, but, what they are also doing is, drastically increasing the load time of these images. When we factor that there are multiple images within a webpage; we can assume how greatly they would affect the total load time or bandwidth consumption - resulting in a very slow website altogether, which we don’t want.
Hence, by optimizing these images we can ensure for a better web experience for our website users. To do that we need to use photo editing tools (for example “Photoshop”), and reduce the image’s resolution through quality settings. Lowering the resolution up to the point just before where the image starts to have a hit on its color or quality would be your sweet spot. Also, some tools offer you options to reduce image file size without making much change to the image’s quality.
This should effectively speedup the theme.
PHP Flush
Like the above step, the purpose of this function is to make your WordPress blog load faster too. A PHP flush should be added immediately after the header, this forces the server to send the header content before rest of the website.
<?php flush(); ?>
What this does is give the browser enough time to load stylesheets in the header reference when it’s waiting for other contents of the webpages to load.
Favicon
Favicon makes your website look professional. But, what is a favicon? It is the icon that you see on the browser’s address bars. Some themes do not come with it by default, in-order to add one you can do the following.
<link rel="icon" href="favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
The “href” refers to the favicon file. Adding this code within the header.php found inside the theme’s directory should get your icon up on the bar.
Theme Security
Hackers and other such malicious users can take advantage of various weaknesses within a specific version of the WordPress to attack your website. What makes it ironic is that, your WordPress version is displayed right on the header.
So, what do you do? There’re few steps you can take to get your website protected – that is by removing the displayed version number altogether. The generator code is placed within the <head> tags of the theme.
Step 1
Step 2
Login Errors
Hiding your login errors is another way of protecting your themes too. The reason being that when a person types in a wrong password or a wrong username this error code reveals the exact type of error to the users.
That is; when one type’s in a wrong username the message states its so, giving the potential hacker a confirmed feedback. And when the password alone is wrong, it states that too, ensuring to them that a username is valid, which only requires from them to hack for the password.
So, to remove this - add the following line under functions.php.
add_filter('login_errors', create_function('$a', "return null;"));
Making these minor changes to your wordpress theme, will ensure that it better optimized for safer and faster browsing experience.
In WordPress, the “Themes” play a vital part in making one’s site look unique and impressive. To that fact, there are thousands of themes available for the users to choose from and download, these are either offered for free or for a premium. However, did you know all these themes can be further tweaked in order to get better optimization, features or customization?
Well, let’s have a look at few simple yet effective tweaks that can be done to your WordPress themes, to offer better and safer experience to your website visitors.
Images are the primary part of most themes; they are on the logos, the backgrounds, icons and so on. However, WordPress theme developers sometimes fail to realize that their high resolution/high quality images are actually doing more bad to the theme users than good.
How? A high resolution image may make the theme look very pretty and luring, but, what they are also doing is, drastically increasing the load time of these images. When we factor that there are multiple images within a webpage; we can assume how greatly they would affect the total load time or bandwidth consumption - resulting in a very slow website altogether, which we don’t want.
Hence, by optimizing these images we can ensure for a better web experience for our website users. To do that we need to use photo editing tools (for example “Photoshop”), and reduce the image’s resolution through quality settings. Lowering the resolution up to the point just before where the image starts to have a hit on its color or quality would be your sweet spot. Also, some tools offer you options to reduce image file size without making much change to the image’s quality.
This should effectively speedup the theme.
PHP Flush
Like the above step, the purpose of this function is to make your WordPress blog load faster too. A PHP flush should be added immediately after the header, this forces the server to send the header content before rest of the website.
<?php flush(); ?>
What this does is give the browser enough time to load stylesheets in the header reference when it’s waiting for other contents of the webpages to load.
Favicon
Favicon makes your website look professional. But, what is a favicon? It is the icon that you see on the browser’s address bars. Some themes do not come with it by default, in-order to add one you can do the following.
<link rel="icon" href="favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
The “href” refers to the favicon file. Adding this code within the header.php found inside the theme’s directory should get your icon up on the bar.
Theme Security
Hackers and other such malicious users can take advantage of various weaknesses within a specific version of the WordPress to attack your website. What makes it ironic is that, your WordPress version is displayed right on the header.
So, what do you do? There’re few steps you can take to get your website protected – that is by removing the displayed version number altogether. The generator code is placed within the <head> tags of the theme.
Step 1
- Check if the following line is present in the header.php <meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo(’version’); ?>" />
- If yes, then remove it, as it prints the version number as the <meta> tag.
Step 2
- Now, under functions.php (you can create one if it does not exist, using “source code editor”) past the following: <?php remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator'); ?>
- This ensures that the version number won’t be available through wp_head()
Login Errors
Hiding your login errors is another way of protecting your themes too. The reason being that when a person types in a wrong password or a wrong username this error code reveals the exact type of error to the users.
That is; when one type’s in a wrong username the message states its so, giving the potential hacker a confirmed feedback. And when the password alone is wrong, it states that too, ensuring to them that a username is valid, which only requires from them to hack for the password.
So, to remove this - add the following line under functions.php.
add_filter('login_errors', create_function('$a', "return null;"));
Making these minor changes to your wordpress theme, will ensure that it better optimized for safer and faster browsing experience.
Friday, January 3, 2014
WordPress vs. Magento : Which Ecommerce Platform is Better For Your Website?
If you are having any idea about opening up a new ecommerce website, or if you are advising anyone, who is planning to build an ecommerce website, then the very first step that you need to take is making a wise decision on which ecommerce platform should be used.
Before choosing a best ecommerce platform for your ecommerce website, there are a few basic things that you need to keep in mind.
As both the ecommerce platforms have same functionality, it is very important for you to keep in mind the background.
WordPress:
WordPress is a free and open source blogging platform created by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. It is a hugely popular content management system or CMS based on PHP and MySQL. It is the single largest ecommerce platform used for content creation. When compared to other platforms, more number of blog posts is written on WordPress websites such as WordPress.org and WordPress.com platforms.
Plugin architecture is one of the very popular features that enable developers to extend its abilities beyond the core installation. WordPress has a huge database that consists of more than 26,000 plugins, each plugin offers custom features and functions that enable developers to build websites based on their specific requirements.
Magento:
On the other hand, Magento is also an open source ecommerce web application that is developed by Varien with the help from developers within the open source community. Magento was started as open source software; hence it was relatively very easy to launch and then it grew rapidly to a point that there is actually more money spent on Magento based websites all around the globe. That is definitely part of why eBay bought Magento now.
Similar to WordPress being a blogging platform that moved into ecommerce, Magento is also an ecommerce platform that added blogging as a plug-in.
It is a fact that there is never a perfect solution for any problem, but if you understand the background of the two ecommerce platforms, you can able to make the right decision on which one will be the best suitable for your ecommerce website.
You may want to build a website that is going to be strictly an ecommerce play, possibly with a blog attached just to enhance the website for good visibility, search engine optimization and user engagement.
Or, you may want to create a website that is going to be a collection of blogs, posts, customer interactions and so on with an element related to that hoping to sell products that are directly tied to the content that is created.
Based on your requirements, you need to choose the best ecommerce platform. With a pure ecommerce website, Magento may be the best option. If your website is more of a content play, then WordPress may be the way you need to go.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)