Website

Issue #1: Several Products & Services

Separate websites for separate products.

Dr English | Dr Job | Prabbal Frank Psychologist | Prabbal Frank Astrologer | The Skills Academy
(corporate trainings)

Issue #2: Overall Setup

Buy the domain and webspace from Hostgator.in

Let WordPress manage the site with necessary plugins and modifications. WP is database driven and
makes pages on the fly according to information requested. It consists of posts, pages and media items
all of whom can be commented upon. All this is presented in desired style with the help of themes and
plugins. It uses PHP and MySQL for maintaining all this.

Issue #3: Language English & Hindi

How to insert Hindi language.

Issue #2: Different Devices (Mobiles, Tabs, Desktops. . . )

Make a responsive website rather than using mobile friendly plugins. A responsive theme would make
content available regardless of device by letting the content rearrange to fit the screen.

While developing use mobile emulators on Chrome to build and run mobile friendly test on Google
Developer to check. Google displays passed sites with mobile friendly tag.

Use a mobile first approach. Mobile issues include:

 Using excerpts for longer articles

 Using compressed images or hiding featured images to reduce duce bandwidth requirements
o WP plugins to compress images: optimus image optimizer, wp smush, tiny compress
images
 Customized menu preferably with easily locatable search bar

Issue #3: Security & Backup

Security from attacks.

 Change your password.

 Keep the site theme and plugins updated.
 Use these two plugins: Limit login attempts and Clef for 2 factor authentication.
 Use these plugins:
o Cloudflare – takes load away and blocks malicious attacks
o Vaultpress for backup
o Akismet to prevent comment spam
 o Jetpack also has protection features.

Use contact form instead of providing email.

Backup: plugins cost.

Issue #4: Structure of Website

Menu
Do not use dropdowns as they are not supported by mobiles.

Put the items which people frequent more or will be trying to find in your site more in the Header and
rest in the Footer.

Posts
They contain info which is ephemeral. Related content are inserted through posts.

You can write a post and then save it as draft first. When you finalize the post you can publish or in case
you don't want it then you can just delete it.

Some posts can be password protected.

They are organized by categories mandatorily and tags optionally. This makes posts sortable.

 The category of author and date are automatically added.

 Categories can further have sub-categories. They should be carefully planned in advance.
 Tags are case-sensitive. So noun and Noun are read as two different tags. They have no
hierarchy.

Do not use Format Panel saying that a post is an image or video as this is not supported by all themes
etc. Instead indicate that a post is a video or article or image by using tags.

Posts can be shared on social sites like Facebook.

The posts are displayed in reverse chronological order in the index page. Limit the number of posts to be
displayed on one page to 10 or 20.

Sticky Post option when checked makes a post stick to the front page. However, this his theme
dependent.

Truncate you post to appear on index page, search pages and mobile devices.

 Select a point in the post and put read more.

 Write a fresh custom excerpt to be displayed. This is theme dependent. It is shown when people
share on social networks like FB. Go to screen options > excerpts. This is how we control what
viewers see.

Pages
They hold info which remains static for long intervals of time.

They have menus and meta-content.

Make pages for:

 Media items - attachment pages

 Summary pages - wherever index is long
 Category pages: There are plugins which add description and images for categories.
 Bio pages for authors.

Navigation has to the built. Great navigation helps people to find things they didn’t know they were
looking for. Map your content and analyze behaviour of your visitors.

Are organized by parent-child relationship.

Home Page display should be a static front page. Plugins can be added to extend home page
functionality.

Media Items
They are treated as attachment post. WP creates large, medium and thumbnail view.

Size is controlled by WP, theme and you.

Attachment pages are theme dependent. Some themes support them. They help with SEO by indexing
and help in google search for images. They also help in social media posts. They are also useful for
creating image galleries. After adding a description under edit more details then link to attachment
page.

Comments
First time there should be authentication before the content appears on the website. Still when people
comment you for the first time just see if they really are saying something or they are writing something
so that you approve and then they can comment scrap things on your website.

Is there a way instead to post comments of Facebook or YouTube?

Contact
Giving email can lead you to receive too many spam emails.

Contact form is a better option.

Insert Google Maps code by the embed code option. Remember to keep the width to 100%.

Themes
Install but do not active till you have tested the theme for looks etc.

Main portions are header, main content, sidebar and footer.

Sidebar is used for inserting widgets.

When we change themes there is often a problem of featured images. Then we need the plugin
Regenerate Thumbnail.

Widgets
Widgets are theme dependent.
Some examples are: search, recent posts, recent comments, archives, categories, meta, pages (other
menus for different sections of the website; exclude pages by ID's etc.). How to make ID's ?

Widgets for related links and recommend links to other pages.

If the widgetized area is not needed then deactivate it rather than wiping it out.

Plugins
Jetpack is available on free WordPress accounts also.

Issue #5: Make the Site Lighter & Faster

Put the heavy content on sites that handle them better.

YouTube for videos. Instagram and Flickr for images. Udemy for free courses. Vimeo for paid courses.
Sound Cloud for audio files. Scribd for pdf documents. Amazon.in for free ebooks.

Issue #6: Options on Various Issues

Text
80% black to be easy on eyes.

Links
Internal links to open in the same tab. External links to open in a separate tab.

Hovers do not work with fingers.

Images
Do use images to make interest content appealing.

Name them according to the section in which they are used.

Compress them.

Make separate folder for icons.

Use more of colored vector images as icons to portray what is being said.

Give proper attribution in the caption attribute. (creativecommons.org). Fill in the alt text field. Fill in the
description which uses a little HTML. The description is shown in case the site has a page for media item.
After adding a description under edit more details then link to attachment page.

Media gallery can be created for similar images.

Featured images panel does not uses caption. It is normally shown at top of page or outside of page's
content. Featured image is also used by social networks like FB to share a page etc. The display of
featured image is theme dependent.

Plugin Fancybox or Tiled Galleries Carousel without Jetpack are wonderful.

Issue #7: Social Buttons
We have to make the site social media friendly to get more readers as well as to get better rankings in
the search engines.

1. Add a social menu which has your FB Profile etc link. Decide which social networks will you use.
Facebook | Google Plus | Instagram | Twitter | Pinterest | Lindedin
2. Add social buttons which people can click and share your posts. This we can do with the help of
plugins.

Jetpack's sharing plugins loads buttons from scripts of respective sites and therefore is a little slow to
load as well as sometimes the image does not load and we have refresh.

WPSocialLite plugin goes in for lazy loading of scripts to remove the above problem. The script is fed
when the user hover over the article.

Share Button by AddThis (addthis.com) goes further in two ways. First it adds sharing options on many
many social networks and that too in the sequence of preference of the individual visitor on the site.
Second, if we make an account with them they let us track the shares and give us important data on
how our posts are being shared and on which networks. Check the asynchronous loading, show. . ,
enhanced accessibility options.

Put the social sharing buttons both at the top and the bottom of all posts. Maybe little smaller under the
title of the post and a little bigger or official buttons at the bottom of the post. We do not want social
buttons on excerpt posts and index pages.

Issue #8: SEO

We have to make our site easy to search on the net and have it ranked high. Google uses the content
quality and ease of social sharing as two of the many criteria to rank a site.

Google results show the title, the url and the description of a page. It picks up the description from the
first line of the page automatically. For SEO, we use the meta-title and the meta-description tags to
provide this info to Google and so controlling what appears on google as well as when the page or post
is shared on social site.

We need to make the title appealing and the description to convey a short summary. Keywords are now
not that important. Special emphasis is to be given to home page description.

All in One SEO Pack by Michael Torbet.

 Enable Canonical URL's to tell google that with posts with different categories we are not just
duplicating our content for better ranking but these are same posts but we get to them from
various place.
 Enable log important events to check what's happening if something goes wrong. Mostly keep
the Keep Original Title disabled. Disable keywords as no one indexes it anymore. Check no index
tags, archives etc.
 Check auto generated descriptions; remove descriptions for paginated pages (page 1, page 2,
page 3);
 Title settings: enable rewrite titles; post title - %post_title% | %blog_title%
WordPress SEO by Yoast

 Security do not enable. You do not want advanced options in your posts as you do not want to
mess up with them.
 Social: FB, Twitter, Google+
o FB – turn on add open graph meta data. Put in FB admin data to your website to let FB
knows that your admin accout is the manager of this site.
o Similarly, twitter handle and google publisher page.
 XML Sitemap: ping google, bing, ask.com |
 Permalink settings: skips category; redirect attachment URLs to parent post URL (good)
 RSS feed: more people are using RSS readers.
 Titles and metas: home; post types – meta-description = excerpts !!; maybe you want to turn off
the taxonomies WP SEO meta box. In WP we get excerpts panel in a post by going to display
above and checking the excerpts option. Excerpts can be longer however, description has a limit
of 156 characters. Social – we can setup custom description for FB and Google+ as when people
are on FB and Google+ they might be looking for some other things.
 Focus keyword: what type of terms are people looking for to search what you are trying to write
or say. This helps you to refine your writing. Then it tells you how many times your focus
keyword appears in your article heading, page title, page url, content and meta-description.
This helps you to change the content to further target the audience you want to target.
 Page analysis checks if your page is reaching SEO potential. Mention keywords in H2s, first
paragraph to make topic clear immediately. Keyword density. Copy score tells how hard the
write up is to read.

Issue #9: Contact Form

Visitor can contact the site owner. We should decide the forms we will need as well as the fields in each
form. We will have to set up the from fields as well as the emailing options.

One plugin comes free with Jetpack and another free plugin is Contact Form 7. Mark required fields.
Make form and setup mail simultaneously. Second email to the person who sends us a message like this
is a copy of the message you submitted to Dr English for your records. We will be in touch shortly. This
plugin does not save messages in WP and to do this we have to install a plugin Flamingo.

A premium plugin is Gravity forms which has a lot of functionality.

Issue #9: Member Area - Login / Sign Up

We need login to create a members area.

Issue #10: Comments

Handle comments through Facebook. When people share, it gets displayed on FB so our post can go
viral. Besides the profiles which are commenting on our blog posts are more credible.

We need to create an FB APP ID at https://developers.facebook.com/apps

Facebook Comments App

Issue #9: Constant Contact via Email
Email at regular intervals to subscribers. The Sign ups etc.

Try analyze MailChimp.

Issue #7: Administering & Updating

Updating
 Revisions: Revisit already made pages at least once in 90 dates and include the latest
technological changes.
 Building: Maintain a frequency for updating posts. We can schedule posts for future time (past
as well).

User Profiles
Subscriber | Contributor | Author | Editor | Administrator

For security keep both a editor and admin role with you. Normally login as an editor to do the changes.

Subscriber can comment or do ecommerce; Contributor can write but not publish posts; Authors can
publish, edit, delete own posts; Editor can post and publish content from all and comment.

Membership to whom anyone.

First time: set timezone, language, default post category and format. Remove Uncategorized category.
Reading: search engine visibility uncheck till you are ready and then ping to all of them for indexing.
Discussion: uncheck attempt. . blogs to prevent from hackers, check others like break my pages (for
comments), nested to 5 levels max; choose which comments should be blacklisted (like carrying the 4
letter word) and which should be emailed to you for moderation.

When travelling we can set up to update through sending an email.

Issue #10: Troubleshooting

Crash: Use FTP application. Go to WP content folder. Find the theme you installed. Rename it.

Migrating: move from local to web or from one server to another with export and import or some
plugin.

Issue #11: Ecommerce

Consider

 What product or service you want to sell

o For physical products – stock management and shipping
 Who do you want to sell it to – thin about their behaviour
o Volume discounts
o Bundle discounts
 How you want to sell
o Online
 Self site
  Amazon and the like (Kobobooks.com for ebooks)
o Physical store
 Self sell
 Through a distributor

Tips to Strategize

 How does your product HELP the customer?

 Is it first, best or different?
 Write better descriptions

Tips to Sell

 You have to bring traffic to your site.

o Facebook and Youtube – offer info that is helpful to people
o Use Facebook comments on your site

Payment Gateway

 Issues
o Security
 SSL certificate – it encrypts data from customer to your server; charged on a
yearly basis. Your site becomes https://
 Virtual private server or private server. This costs. Problem with shared server is
that if one site gets hacked your site is at risk too.
 If not VPS then get shared hosting from a better host like: page.ly; dream host;
blue host; site5; rack space; wpengine.
o Monitoring Security – sucuri.net
o Backup – regularly; vaultpress.com
o More info: WP3 Develop Secure Sites Course and Lockign Down WP free ebook on
codepoet.com
o What taxes apply ?
 Option for payment
o Payment portal like PAYPAL
o Directly to your bank
o Direct bank transfer
 Ecommerce plugin is better than a theme containing ecommerce options.

Lynda.com Courses to Watch

 User experience fundamentals for web design by Chris Nodder
 WP Developer Tips: Locking down WP
 WP Plugins: Backing up your site
 WP Master Class Playlist
 Playlist: Plugin Powered WP: SEO = SEO fundamentals, web analytics fundamentals, SEO: Link
Building in Depth
 HTML 5: web forms | CSS: Styling forms | WP3: Building Child Themes
Other Skills to Polish or Develop
 HTML 5
 CSS
 Javascript
 C++
 App development in Android