JPstation Blogger Template

JPstation Blogger Template

Instructions for JPstation: How to Install a Blogger Template

IMPORTANT NOTE:

After uploading this template, go to Layout and find the Recent Post widget.

Edit the Recent post widget and place the following code in the content box.

<ul class='rpostx'>
<script src='/feeds/posts/default/?alt=json-in-script&amp;callback=dropdownposts'>
</script></ul>

<ul class='rcommentsx'>
<script src='/feeds/comments/default?alt=json-in-script&amp;callback=dropdowncomment'>
</script></ul>

Do you like this template? Please follow us! 

Google Social Reports Tool Explained

Website Designers and Website Developers are always on the lookout for software and website tools to either improve your own website, or to help guide your clients. In today’s environment, with technology development speeding up as quickly as it is, it’s sometimes harder to sort through all of the new tools than it is to find new tools.

Google Analytics Social Reporting Tool Explained

New and existing companies are constantly putting out new website software or updating their existing software to provide their customers with new features. Website Designers and Developers must spend time learning about all of the website software on the market so that they are prepared to answer client questions, as well as, integrate new software into their websites. One website tracking tool that has been all of the rage lately is the Google Analytics Social Reporting Tool.

You may have heard about the Social Reports feature offered free of charge through Google Analytics. Finally, the golden question of “What is the return-on-investment of our social media campaign?” can now be answered more easily thanks to another great tool put out by Google. Website owners now have better social media monitoring and measurement capabilities thanks to Google’s Social Reporting Tool.

Almost all Website Designers and Website Developers at least know about Google Analytics, and a large portion of you are probably using it for your website and for client websites. You could spend days digging through all of the data provided through Google Analytics. Now that Google has put out a set of reports we thought we would save you a little time by breaking them down so that you can understand what the Social Reports offer and what the benefits to you and your clients can be. Although Google Social Reports can be set up to collect and filter data from over 400 social media platforms out there, with all of the big players like Facebook and Twitter included, its deepest integration is with Google+ (which makes sense).

In this article we will breakdown many of the reports that Google Analytics customers will now have access to free of charge, discuss what data is captured and reported on through each report, and what the benefits of each report are to website owners.

Google Social Visitors Flow Report
Not claiming it to be the most valuable, but the coolest and most visually understandable reporting feature in Google Social Reports is Social Visitors Flow. Website owners are able to not only see how many hits are coming from various social media channels, but one is also able to follow the traffic from the initial starting page to see which pages users flow downstream to. Details about how many visitors visited a starting page, then subsequent pages after that is clearly shown. Also, the user is able to easily see how many “drop offs” there were from each page visited. To dig deeper, you are able to choose to show all the traffic from only one social media channel at a time. This ability really lets you gain an understanding of where traffic from a particular social media channel is ultimately ending up on your website before they drop off.

source: Social Media Examiner

Being able to quickly and accurately see what social networks website visitors are coming from, what page they are landing on, and where they are navigating to throughout your website is a very valuable tool. Google gets it. Now it’s time for website owners to take advantage.

Social Plugins Report
Almost every blog you read these days has those icons that we have all grown to know and love. You know the ones… The “Tweet This”, “Like on Facebook”, “+1”, etc. Smart website owners use these social plugins to make it extremely easy for their website visitors to share website content within their social networks. Tools like Social Plugins are great for getting your website content in front of new visitors. Not only that, but they empower the user to make the recommendation, which is a much strong recommendation in the eyes of the new reader since it’s coming from a trusted source.

Google Social Plugins

At a high level the Social Plugins Report allows website owners to see exactly which pages are being shared socially the most. Drill down further to see how many times each page was shared via different social media channels. This is a very powerful report in regards to finding out which posts your viewers think are most interesting and worthy of passing on. Armed with this information website owners can find out which topics their visitors are the most interested in, and then can write more articles about those topics. Over time this will lead to increased engagement from your community, as well as, increased traffic to your website by way of those readers sharing your content with their community.

Social Value Report
One of the biggest questions people who use social media for sales and marketing ask is, “how can I tell how many sales are generated from my social media marketing efforts”? There are ways to find these numbers, but it normally takes a lot of foresight, time, and money to ensure you’re getting accurate data. Although Google’s Social Value report still has some way to go to fully report e-Commerce conversions, it’s a good first step.

The Social Value Report details how many visitors from social media sources were converted into paying customers. That said, there is a little upfront work that must be done in order to set this report up properly. First, you must first set up “conversions” or GOALS within your Google Analytics account. If you have a clear monetary value for your website conversion, you can actually add that information into the Goals that you set up in Google Analytics. This will actually allow you to determine an accurate dollar amount or “Social Value” that your social media efforts are generating.

Social Data Hub for Tracking Off-Site Activity
A more advanced feature of the Google Social Reports is Social Data Hub. Google has partnered with a lot of the social networking sites out there to bring Google Analytics users even more insight into which content is bringing the most value to readers. Referred to as an “off-site activity” reporting tool, website owners are now able to gain an understanding of +1’s and comments that take place outside of your website. A large list of Social Data Hub partners exists. Some of the big name partners include Digg, Gigya, Meetup, Reddit, Blogger, and Delicious. Prior to this report, companies had to spend a considerable amount of time and money to get access to this data. Now by digging into Social Sources in Google Analytics you can look at the specific social media tools that are producing the most engagement around your content.

source: Social Media Examiner

Social Sources Report
One of the simpler and more basic reports, Social Sources lets users quickly compare their overall web traffic to web traffic specifically derived from social media sources. Most importantly one can determine how many visits each social media source is providing, the number of page views from each source, and the average visit duration from each source. These statistics give valuable insight into which sources are supplying the visitors that are spending the most time and visiting the most pages on your site.

By keeping an eye on this report website owners can determine which social media tools are working best for their website and then start spending more time on those social networks instead of other underperforming social networks. For example, if you assume Facebook is the best social network for attracting visitors to your website, but after a few months of watching this report it shows that Facebook is actually behind Twitter and LinkedIn in terms of attracting new traffic to your website, it may be that you decide to stop spending so much time promoting your content on Facebook, and start focusing more on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Activity Stream Report
The Google Activity Stream Report is a real-time social media monitoring report that allows you to monitor who’s interacting with your content through specific social channels like:

Delicious
Digg
Google+
Echo
Many more
The Activity Stream Report allows you to see who’s talking about your content and allows you to respond to those folks in real-time. You can also click a button to “follow” or “monitor” the conversation to see which direction it takes, who joins the conversation, etc. Website owners receive the benefit of having this report segmented by “conversations” and “events”.

Source: Social Media Examiner

Conversations include:

New posts from anyone on the social network where the conversation is taking place
Content shares/reshares
Comments by users

Events include:

Bookmarks
Votes
Shares
There is still room for improvement (if Google decides to go this route) as currently Facebook and Twitter are not included. You can probably understand why Facebook isn’t included since Facebook and Google butt heads so much, but at the very least, Twitter should be included. This would take the Activity Stream Report to the next level.

Use Google Social Reports to Better Use Social Media and Engage Website Traffic
Hopefully after reading this article you are better informed on just what all of the buzz has been about in regards to Google’s Social Reports. Once again, Google Analytics and all of the Social Reports, are absolutely free for anyone with a website. These reports can provide you with an incredible amount of information about your website traffic. These new Social Reports are a step in the right direction in regards to finding out exactly how your social media marketing efforts are paying off either in the form of increased website traffic or even increased sales. I know that Website Designers and Website Developers have a lot of new software that they must learn and implement for their own websites and for client website, but I highly recommend that you spend some time learning more about Google Social Reports. You will be happy that you did!

Are you currently using Google Social Reports? Any feedback? Please tell us your comments below.

Speed up wordpress

Speed up WordPress

There is some secrets you need to know to speed up wordpress, and I’ll share what I did with IVYthemes in this article.
IVYthemes had a decent page load time, in most countries, but it wasn’t as snappy as I would like, and in some countries it was pretty slow, with a page load time of over 8 seconds for our homepage. This is actually pretty horrible, and there are studies done that states that anything above 3 seconds is unacceptable for most visitors, they give up and go away from your site. We of course want our visitors to stay as long as possible and have a great experience on our site, so getting the page load time down was a high priority for us. We managed to get below a 1 second load time on our homepage by doing the following tweaks:

So, how to speed up WordPress?

DNS
There are some options but first you should make sure your DNS is reliable. If your registrar don’t have stellar reputation for their DNS, then a service like Cloudflare would be a great option, they have a free account, which covers both great DNS, security and some speed optimizations as well, but we’ll get back to those later.

Improving your WordPress efficiency by even 10 percent won’t matter if your DNS is not reliable.

Hosting
Next is a good web host. There’s lots of poor choices out there, with badly managed, oversold shared hosting accounts. I already had this covered by hosting the site at Liquidweb, which I have good experience with from before, after trying a lot of hosting companies over the years. Check them out by clicking here. 

Theme
Then you need a clean, no bloat theme. Thrive themes is my personal choice for this site, and I also used it on 3dprintviking.com, but Genesis is a widely used theme framework which is also a great option.

Plugins
The next area you should focus on, is unused and unneeded plugins. Keep only the plugins that you really need. And only the ones with with solid, proven code behind them that are actively supported. This prevents uneeded load requests and keeps your plugin list nice and tidy. (Yes, I’m a neat freak)
WordPress is reliable and stable, and it can handle 40 or more plugins if they are all the right ones. But it only takes one badly coded plugin to make your site slow or unstable, get it fixed now!

Image optimizing (automatically)

Yahoo! has a great image optimizer called Smush.it that will reduce the file size of an image drastically, while at the same time keeping the quality.

However, doing this one image at a time would be a pain in the ass, and take too much time. I’m a fan of automatization so using the free plugin WP-SmushIt  was perfect for saving a lot of time! It does slow down uploading images a bit, but it’s still well worth it.

Download WP-SmushIt here

Caching
WordPress origin caching can be done with several plugins, but the two plugins that is most recommended is WP Super cache and W3 Total Cache. WP Super cache is the easiest to use of those, and speeds up your website immensly, but W3 Total Cache is more advanced and has more possibilities, but keep in mind that many features are limited due to your server configuration and you need to sign up to external CDN’s (Content Delivery Networks), like Amazon S3, Akamai etc.

Which of them you’ll use, depends on how much configuration you want to do, what your server supports etc. I’ve used both on this site and got great results with both, but I’ve landed on W3 Total cache as it was the fastest of the two, but you can’t go wrong with either one in that regard. However, if you prefer the easiest option, you should go with WP Super Cache.

Download WP Super Cache here

Download W3 Total Cache here

Tools
I use and recommend Pingdom Tools to check my site load time. I recommend doing one before you start optimizing wordpress, so you see where your coming from, and of course several times during optimization, so you can get inspired by the ever faster wordpress load times.

I hope you are inspired to speed up wordpress by this article, we all want a faster web experience.

Convert more of your traffic to revenue

Convert more of your traffic to revenue

If you’ve ever tried to earn revenue on your WordPress website, then you probably know that conversions are king. Website traffic is a good thing—but leveraging it to turn a profit is another ballgame entirely. There are many tools to convert more of your traffic.

Turning web traffic into revenue is a lot like closing a sale. There are a lot of elements to consider, and all of them need to be in the right place at the right time. Getting people to sign up for your mailing list, gathering numbers for text-blasts, attracting followers on social media, and selling products to online visitors are just a few of the many things that need to be done right if you’re hoping to turn larger profits on your ecommerce WordPress site.

Of course, every site and company will be different—so some parts of your strategy might differ from those used to convert traffic on other websites.

But with that being said, don’t make the mistake of thinking that the main, core principles don’t apply to your business too. There is an art to getting visitors to buy from you—and unless you can find a way to tap into this mentality, you’re going to end up frustrated and disappointed.

How can Thrive Themes help?

This website basically offers subscribers a wide range of different WordPress themes, plugins, and tools that are specifically designed with traffic conversion in mind. The themes are lightning fast, the plug-ins are smart and intuitive, and the mailing list tools are cutting-edge and easy to use.

If you’re thinking about overhauling your WordPress site in an effort to make it more profitable (or are thinking of building a new WordPress website and need a theme and some plug-ins), then I would definitely recommend ThriveThemes.com for several different reasons.

They focus specifically on conversion

According to this article on nngroup.com, users often leave web pages after 10 to 20 seconds.

I’m not sure how familiar you are with ecommerce statistics—but to put it simply, that’s not a very long time.

You don’t have hours to get customers to commit—and when they do decide to commit, you need to make the process fast, easy, and simple.

That’s why conversion-focused tools are so important. If you don’t focus on conversion, you’re simply going to lose the customer. It’s pure mathematics.

Their themes look amazing

The WordPress themes offered by Thrive Themes are beautiful (We use thrive themes ignition on our site). I understand that the main focus of these tools is to turn visitors into customers, but they really seem to make an effort to do this with style.

The layouts are clean, the tools are seamless, and the workflow within the builder is nearly perfect.

Giving your website a professional look is extremely important. If your site looks sloppy, then you’re going to be much more likely to lose customers—especially if you have any kind of competition to speak of.

But Thrive Themes offers themes and a builder that can really help to offset this challenge. Creating professional looking WordPress websites with these tools is surprisingly simple—and to be honest, the results are often very attractive.

Have a look at the best school for hypnosis in Norway: Hypnoseutdanning – For a great example of a site using Thrive themes.

They maintain an awesome blog filled with relevant news and ideas

Another awesome thing about ThriveThemes.com is that they maintain a blog on their website—and do a great job of it! If you’re looking for tips that’ll make you better at turning visitors into customers using their WordPress themes and tools, then this is definitely a resource that will help!

I realize that hosting a blog isn’t necessarily a ‘big deal’ anymore, but I’m always disappointed when the blogs I visit are lame, dull, or full of mindless SEO filler. This definitely isn’t the case with the blog hosted by ThriveThemes.com. In fact, as I was looking over the topics, I bookmarked several of them for my own research purposes!

In Conclusion

If you’re looking to create or improve your own WordPress website, and need to focus more on conversion so that your visitors can start earning you more revenue, then I would definitely consider giving ThriveThemes.com a try. Their themes are awesome, their tools are intuitive, and their website is easy to navigate and use.

Even a complete novice could use these tools—so make sure to check them out before choosing your next plug-in or WordPress toolbox.

Click here to go to Thrive Themes.

Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons

ExtraNews WordPress theme

ExtraNews WordPress theme is a uniquely responive news theme for all sorts of publishers. Great for review, news and blog sites, with integrated reviews, video, slideshows, and galleries in each post.

Author:

Themewich

Is WordPress Just for Blogging?

Is WordPress just for blogging, or can you do more with it? These 5 points will show you why the answer is yes!

Is WordPress just for blogging? I’ve heard this question hundreds of times. Yes, it’s true that back when it was first created, WordPress was designed specifically as a blogging platform—but this definitely isn’t the case nowadays.

Of course, there are some ins and outs to this discussion. While it’s true that WordPress might not have an answer to every web-design conundrum, it’s also true that it can do far more than a lot of people give it credit for.

In this post, we’re going to discuss 5 reasons for why WordPress isn’t just for blogging anymore.

Please keep in mind that every website’s needs are different, and that it is possible that WordPress won’t work for yours. But on the other hand, there are literally thousands of tools that have been created specifically to address different needs within the platform—so the odds that you’ll find a way to make it work for you if you try are pretty good!

You can publish any type of content on a WordPress site

One major reason for why WordPress isn’t just for blogging anymore is because you can publish basically anything on it. You can post images, videos, and text, add captions, display documents, offer downloads, and more.

You can even design a storefront and display images of your products for your customers to see, just like any other e-commerce site would enable you to do.

Being able to publish content like this certainly gives WordPress an edge in the website-design realm—and is a big part of why it’s so popular.

Because professionals are using WordPress to create dynamic, professional websites every day

For anyone concerned with the belief that WordPress is just for blogging, I would definitely recommend a look at the WordPress showcase. Some of the sites that have been created with it are nothing short of amazing—and if those companies and people can do it, so can you!

There are a ton of themes that’ll work well for static content

WordPress themes come in all shapes and sizes—and there are definitely some awesome options out there that don’t require you to have a blog at all.

A quick look at the WordPress Theme Repository will show you that there are more than enough different types of themes to satisfy almost any website need. You can seriously do just about anything with WordPress nowadays—and now, blogging isn’t always a requirement.

The idea that WordPress is just for blogging is seriously outdated

To be completely honest, the idea that WordPress was just for blogging was an old notion even as far back as 2013!

The platform has come such a long way now that it’s almost not even in the same category. Yes, WordPress starting as a blogging platform for hobbyists and amateur writers—but nowadays, even top-level businesses sometimes choose to use WordPress to power their websites.

You can do basically anything with a WordPress site

Whether you want to inform, educate, sell, display, or network, WordPress has the plugins, tools, widgets, and themes to get you started and working. Gone are the days when you had to work everything around a blog. Now, you can choose and customize a theme based on what you actually need your site to do—and then work outward from there.

WordPress is Open Source, requires no licensing fees, can be used for any purpose, can be changed or altered to fit your needs and vision, and can be distributed as needed for any reason. It’s a true free software, but it’s also flexible and contains a wealth of resources to help you make your website as good as it can possibly be!

You may still need to buy a custom theme or a few plugins, but this is a small price to pay for the benefits that you’ll receive in terms of flexibility, ease-of-use, and cost-effectiveness.

Some people say that WordPress works fine if you don’t need your website to be ‘serious’ or ‘professional’, but these are also misconceptions. There are a lot of businesses and entrepreneurs that choose to use WordPress, mainly because it offers so much flexibility and has the potential to be customized to just about any extent.

With this platform, your imagination is truly the limit. If you can dream it, then you can probably (at least for the most part) do it with WordPress.

Photo Credit: Flickr creative commons, Nic McPhee. Sourced from this page.

WordPress Business Website. Awesome!

3 Reasons to use a WordPress Business Website over Hiring a Coder

Many businesses has a WordPress Business Website. In fact WordPress is the CMS of choice for over 73 million websites, and many of them is a Wordpress Business Website. As an open-source platform, it’s grown by staggering leaps and bounds over the past few years—and for good reason. It’s free to use, easy to figure out, and is available to basically anyone with access to a computer and the internet.

It can even be self-hosted for those among us who are ‘tech savvy’ enough to figure it out!

But what about the idea of using a WordPress business website? Does it really bring enough to the table to be useful for e-commerce, or does it leave a bit to be desired on the modern business medium of the World Wide Web?

Can you use a WordPress business site and have confidence that you’ll be taken care of two, three, or four years down the road—or will you reach a disappointing end and be forced to start over from scratch with a coder or a web-design company anyway?

In this article, we’re going to discuss this topic and give you 3 great reasons for why you should definitely consider using WordPress for your online business web-presence. Granted, WordPress might have a few shortcomings, but you may be surprised at what this open-source powerhouse can do for you on a low to medium-sized budget (or no budget at all, for that matter).

Setting up a WordPress business website is easy

WordPress is inherently easy to work with. With that being said, customizing it all by yourself can be a bit daunting!

But that’s what themes are for. And if you’re thinking of using a WordPress business site, then you’re definitely going to want to shop for some business or e-commerce themes that fit your plan and sales model.

As a general rule, you’re going to want to look for premium themes if you plan on using your website for business purposes—especially if you plan on maintaining an online storefront. It’s not uncommon to spend $60 or so on a good one—but still, this is much cheaper than hiring a coder or a web designer. We are launching a WordPress theme and plugins marketplace real soon as well, so you should be able to find some good ones there, when it’s up and running.

Thousands of plugin choices make adding e-commerce features to your website easy

If you don’t need a full-fledged theme, then you can still create a functional WordPress business website by utilizing plugins. There are quite a few good ones out there, but you might need to do some shopping around to find them.

One possible option is Selz. This is actually a free plugin that makes selling physical and digital products extremely easy—and it can be integrated into virtually any WordPress site.

Of course, your choice of plugins will depend mostly on what you plan on doing. Certain types of e-commerce might require different tools, so schedule plenty of time for research. Remember to test everything thorougly before launching, to make sure that you won’t be struggling with technical difficulties on website-launch day.

WordPress is mobile-friendly

Believe it or not, more personal internet time is now spent on mobile devices than desktop computers! In fact, in October of 2015, the average adult was spending nearly 3 hours using their mobile phones! This was up quite a bit from what it was back in 2010, when it was estimated to be somewhere around 24 minutes.

In the meantime, desktop use has pretty much remained the same—sitting right at 2.4 hours.

So what does this mean for you?

It means that if you want to successfully build and operate a WordPress business website, you’re going to have to make sure that you build it to be mobile-optimized.

But thankfully, with WordPress, that’s not a problem. From responsive admin screens, to responsive images, to fully-fleshed-out responsive themes, finding the right tools to make your site mobile-friendly shouldn’t be that big of a problem.

It is true that a bit of customization might be required to make it look as good as possible—but in general, this is another area of internet technology that WordPress has been keeping up with rather well.

Building a WordPress business website might not necessarily be hassle-free at every turn—but it’ll save you money, and the truth is that even larger businesses can make use of it and experience very professional results while doing so.

Photo Credit: www.joshmacdonald.net. Found on Flicker Creative Commons.

WordPress: Why use it?

Looking to build a cheap website without hiring a coder? Here’s why WordPress might be the tool for you!

WordPress has almost re-defined what it means to start a website nowadays. Since its inception back in 2003, it’s graduated from a small blogging platform to a major player in the do-it-yourself website industry. In fact, according to this survey, it powers approximately 22.5% of all of the websites that are currently on the internet!

It also helps to start 100,000 websites each and every day, and is currently the most popular content management system in existence.

If you’re thinking about starting a new website, or are wondering if WordPress might be a good choice for you, then maybe this post will help to give you some reasons to at least consider it.

In this article, we’re going to answer a few basic questions and provide you some relevant answers that will hopefully give you a better idea as to what you’re looking at as you consider WordPress for your web development needs.

• Is WordPress supported by a lot of web hosts and providers?
• Is WordPress easy to use?
• Does WordPress work well for SEO?
• Is WordPress free to use?

Let’s talk about these!

There are a ton of web providers that support it

Not too long ago, finding the right hosting provider for your website was a big deal, because moving once your online web presence was established could very well become problematic. Unless you were a coder and built your website with this in mind (or hired someone to do this for you), then there was always a chance that you were going to get ‘stuck’ with a provider until you figured out a way to move without losing data or racking up hours of extra work.

This was especially true (and continues to be so) with hosting services that used any kind of ‘build it yourself’ tools.

But WordPress helps to mitigate this problem by offering you a platform that you can pack up and take with you basically anywhere. So many providers and developers can work with it that the fear of getting stuck in one place with WordPress is basically nonexistent.

It’s easy to use

WordPress designers are definitely worth their weight in gold, and if you hire a good one, you’ll be amazed at what you can achieve.

At the same time, however, it is possible for a complete novice to build a working, functional, and attractive website with it (and to do so relatively quickly). If you can fire up your computer, load a browser, and use the internet, then you basically have all of the skills required to get a website up-and-running with this system.

WordPress is awesome for SEO

SEO is definitely a big deal nowadays. Everyone wants to know that their website is going to have a chance to rank well with search engines, and WordPress is definitely capable of fulfilling this function.

For one, it works well on mobile devices—which is something that Google is caring more and more about these days. Secondly, it gives you the ability to customize your SEO settings—which is a must these days. And of course, Google has always loved text based websites (especially blogs), so it’s not too difficult to see how Google and WordPress are literally an almost-perfect match for one-another.

It’s Free

WordPress is basically free to use—which makes it even better for small business owners and individuals who need a functional, attractive website on a budget. You’ll still need to pay for things like web and domain hosting (in most cases, anyway), but these are pretty small recurring costs.

One of the biggest costs associated with a new web startup is the cost for the website itself. It can often cost thousands of dollars to get a professional site designed—and that’s not including any of the content!

Granted, there might be some extremely technical things that would be a challenge to accomplish with it, but for the vast majority of businesses and individuals, WordPress (with the assistance of thousands of plugins and downloadable themes), will work for just about any type of site that you could possibly want to build.

In the end, there’s no better way to determine whether or not WordPress might be right for you other than to give it a try. Visit the official company website for more information, and to figure out how to get started. Odds are good that you’ll be glad you did!

Photo Credit: Wonderlane. To view the original image, click here.

Ironicament Responsive Blogger Theme

Ironicament Responsive Blogger Theme

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