Drag and drop WordPress Plugins and Themes

Are you new to WordPress or web design
? Do you need help designing your own theme with unique page layouts? Here are some helpful drag and drop plugins and theme:

Drag and Drop WordPress themes

* Builder from iThemes – The power of Builder starts in the layout editor. Choose from the building blocks of a great web site by inserting modules: header, images, navigation, content area (with or without sidebars), widget bars, HTML areas, and a footer. Complete flexibility without code.

Best WordPress Permalink structure

The best WordPress permalink structure depends on your needs. This post analyses different permalink structures, their pros and cons and recommends best WordPress permalink structure for blogs, news portals and websites for better SEO and performance.

When you install WordPress, the default permalink structure you have is http://example.com/?p=123 . You can retain this structure if having the shortest URL possible is your priority. Else, you need to change this for better SEO.

WordPress automatic Thumbnail issue with Hostgator

Are you in Hostgator and having problem with WordPress automatic thumbnail generation? Contact their Live Chat support to get it fixed.

If you are hosted with, you may have a problem with theautomatic thumbnail generation feature that many WordPress provide.

Free WordPress site review for Non Profit Organizations

Are you a NPO running a WordPress site and looking for some help to improve it?

I would be glad to offer free site reviews and resources for FIVE organizations this year. I can help you with better
SEO, page load time, design and WordPress usage.

Interview with Jonathan Tittle of Nodeki Hosting

We host most of our network blogs with and we find their service excellent. I like Nodeki for its fanatical customer support, fast loading times, cost effectiveness, simple design and offering lifetime package. So, I got Jonathan Tittle, the founder of Nodeki to answer some of our questions.

WordPress Video Tutorials

Sites offering WordPress Video tutorials

* WP101 – This is the most popular WordPress video tutorial site. Has a members forum too. The videos are of top quality but I find the collection very limited and strictly only for beginners. They also provide white label versions to showcase in your site and a WordPress dashboard plugin. Because of this, you may find the same videos in various sites

* wpLifeGuard– Pretty similar to WP101. Has written manuals for assistance. Also offers the tutorials through a plugin.

WordPress web hosting survey

We resell Hostgator shared hosting at MilkHost. Though people love it for its pricing, support and features, shared hosting does have its limitations. Once your WordPress site starts attracting huge traffic, Hostgator shuts down the site. Outages, database connection errors and occasional sluggishness can hurt a business dependent on it. At the same time, the pricing and WordPressinstall limitations offered by most of the managed WordPress hosts is simply beyond the reach of many.

Managed WordPress Maintenance and Support

If you are a busy / technically naive blogger or a business using WordPress, you may require professional help to maintain your WordPress site.

Maintaining your WordPress installation includes:

* Regular upgrades for WordPress, themes and plugins.

* Having scheduled backups for database and media.

* Monitoring the site for security breaches.

* Monitoring and optimizing the site for performance, page load time.

WordPress and business opportunities

I gave a talk on WordPress and business opportunities at the Open Weekends event at Chennai on May 25th, 2013. I explained the WordPress ecosystem comprising of premium themes and plugins, managed and hosted services and freelancing opportunities with WordPress. I followed it with a demo of using WordPress insisting on the use case that WordPress is just not a blog but a CMS that can be extended with custom post types. I was quite surprised that only a handful of the quite knowledgeable crowd were aware of WordPress software. Awareness about WordPress.com was better.Following were some of the questions that followed:

Premium Real Estate WordPress Themes

Collection of premium real estate WordPress themes to compare features, price and demos.

1. AgentPress Real Estate WordPress theme

The AgentPress theme is an ideal solution for real estate agents looking to market themselves and rise above competition.

Business models for premium WordPress plugins

Are you considering to sell premium WordPress plugins? Here are some existing business models.

Sell support

Easy Digital Downloads provides basic support for free and offers priority support for monthly and yearly price.

Premium WordPress themes and plugins in my collection

When we started using WordPress in early 2007, we never imagined we will buy a WordPresstheme or plugin. But when we started freelancing in 2009, we needed to distinguish myself from the competition and started offering premium theme designs as part of the packages we provided. This turned out to be very attractive for my prospective clients. Since then, we started collecting themes from various theme clubs.

WordPress 3.5 features

WordPress 3.5 has been released.
Here is a feature roundup as highlighted in the official About page you will see in the Dashboard.

New Media Manager

Beautiful Interface

Adding media has been streamlined with an all-new experience, making it a breeze to upload files and place them into your posts.

WordCamps in India

Forthcoming WordCamps in India

None announced yet. Track the WordCamp Central schedule for more WordCamps in future.

List of past WordCamps in India

2013 January – Baroda WordCamp
2013 February – Pune WordCamp
2012 October – Mumbai WordCamp
2012 March – Cuttack WordCamp
2011 October – Jabalpur WordCamp

2009 February – Delhi WordCamp

WordPress Theme Frameworks and Starter Themes

_s or underscores

Underscores is a starter theme for WordPress made by Automattic claiming to provide a 1000 hours head start. It is a theme meant for hacking and best not used as a parent theme.
Here’s what’s currently in _s:

• A just right amount of lean, well-commented, modern, HTML5 templates.
• A helpful 404 template.
• A sample custom header implementation in inc/custom-header.php that can be activated by uncommenting one line in functions.php and adding the code snippet found in the comments of inc/custom-header.php to your header.php template.

Tips for Better Freelancing

Some tips for better freelancing from my experience

1. Focus

Focus on working in a niche and developing your skill sets, client base in that field. Don’t jump at every new technology or quote beyond your specialization.

Sometimes, it can be too tempting to over specialize too. Resist that. Always try to keep various doors open with a particular area of focus.

2. Invest

Invest on the right tools, learning and training resources. This can give an edge over others who hesitate to do that. At the same time, don’t go overboard shopping for these things. Especially, when you have all those Black friday deals

Selling WordPress businesses

The WordPress economy is maturing now and we are starting to see more acuisitions, mergers and sale of whole line of products and brands.

DevPress and Themelab got sold out recently.

Press75 tried selling unsuccessfully through Flippa

https://flippa.com/3056892-pr-6-site-with-13-621-uniques-mo-making-5-268-mo-selling-wordpress-themes

How to install WordPress?

WordPress can be installed easily using one click tools or manual methods. This article describes best practices for WordPress setup.

How to install WordPress?

Many of my friends have started moving to self-hosted WordPresswebsites. Most of them think that they need to install it manually. No need. Follow the steps below.

Installation

There are few automatic tools to enable one click easy installation of WP and many other popular software.

Blogger to WordPress converts – Beginner Questions

WordPress is better and different than Blogger. This article answers common questions asked by people who moved from Blogger to WordPress.

WordPress is better and different compared to Blogger. This article answers common questions asked by people who moved from Blogger to WordPress.

Where is my Dashboard?

See Site admin under Meta section in the right side bar of your blog.

Can I edit my theme?

If you have installed WordPress software in your own site, yes. If you are using WordPress.com then you need to pay 15 USD to edit your theme. Alternatively, you can choose from different themes given at Site Dashboard -> Appearance -> Themes

Do I have facility like edit layout->page elements in Blogger?

Yes. Check Site Appearance–> Widgets. You can re arrange the order of widgets in your side bar.

How to import my blog posts, comments from Blogger?

Tools–> import–> blogger and follow the directions. It is easy, quick and automatic.

What is the difference between page and post?

Pages are more important and permanent posts that you would like to show to all your readers. For example, you can write about you, provide contact form, list archive of posts. These pages will always visible in navigation menu.

How can I change the long post URL-s?

WordPress.com automatically keeps your post heading as part of the URL. So, go to write post or edit post. Below the post title field, you have an option to change the URL. For who have installed WP in their own sites, go to Settings–>permalinks for changing settings for all posts.

Tamil in WordPress?

See relevant links for Tamil in WordPress.

How to Troubleshoot WordPress?

 If you have a problem with WordPress, these simple steps and resources will help you troubleshoot.

Whenever you have a problem with your WordPress website,

0. Don’t Panic. So far as your WordPress database and wp-contents folder is fine, you are fine.

1. Switch to the default WordPress template and deactivate all plugins. If you are fine now, switch to another trouble free template or activate the plugins one by one to find out the culprit.

If you still have problem, it is possibly a WordPress problem. Then, there are few places to ask for WordPress help:

* WP support forum for How-To and Troubleshooting. Check other WP help forums too.

* Frequently asked questions for WP troubleshooting

* WP documentation for troubleshooting.

* Tweet your question with the hashtags #WordPress and #help

2. Ask your friends using WordPress for help.

3. Create a test installation of WP in another server and make sure it isn’t a hosting problem.

4. Try all new WP upgrades at the above test installation before you try with your regular blogs.

5. If nothing works, time to hire a WordPress consultant

WordPress Tips

Collection of useful links for WordPress Tips and Tricks. Includes tips for WordPress page speed and bulk deleting spam comments.

WordPress tips which I personally found useful:

* Bulk delete spam comments

* How to fix if your stats plugin keeps showing zero visits?

* WordPress page specific header images

* To speed up WordPress, add the following to your wp-config.php:

// Enable the WordPress Object Cache:
define(ENABLE_CACHE, true);

WordPress.com Vs WordPress.org

WordPress.com is good for having reliable hosting, site security, community and best suited for tech novices. WordPress.org gives you complete freedom, branding, value for domain name, more than blogging for an affordable cost.

Which is good? WordPress.com or WordPress.org? Both have their pros and cons.

WordPress.com advantages
Reliable hosting:

A WordPress.com blog gets world class free hosting. So your blog is always fast. A WordPress.org blog in own domain, if not maintained well, may become slow. Also, some hosts have problems with some of the WordPress.org features. So, you need to choose your host carefully.

Technical Expertise:

In WordPress.com you need not worry about anything except writing. But, in WordPress.org you need to have mimimum technical skills atleast. Or, you need to find someone who can maintain it for free or cost.

WordPress Security Tips

Easy and common sense tips for better WordPress security. Keep WordPress themes and plugins update. Use a strong and unique password.

WordPress security tips:

* Keep your WordPress installation and plugins up-to-date always and immediately. Many attackers try to take advantage of loopholes in outdated software. So, do not hesitate to upgrade WordPress fearing it would break custom made themes and plugins. Security should be the top priority. Use only trusted sources for WordPress themes and plugins. Please be aware that most of the pretty looking free WordPress themes may be having malware.

* Use a strong, unique and different password each for WordPress admin user name, WordPress MySQL database, FTP user account and the web hosting control panel user name.

These two steps are the most important WordPress security measures as recommended by Matt, the WordPress founder.

Slow WordPress?

Is your WordPress site slow? Try these simple steps to increase  your page loading speed:

1. Upgrade WordPress software, current theme and plugins to their latest versions.

2. Use W3 Total Cache plugin. This will increase page speed for repeat visitors and non-bouncing visitors.

3. Deactivate and delete as many unnecessary plugins you can. Check the remaining plugins using P3 (Plugin performance profiling plugin). If you can implement a function by directly modifying the theme without using the plugin, then do it.