WordPress for Startups

WordPress for Startups
August 18, 2013, Hub Tel Aviv
By: Miriam Schwab
Follow us: facebook.com/illuminea
Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

Who am I?
• Friendly CEO of illuminea
• 100+ WordPress sites
• 7+ years with WP
• Local WordCamp
organizer for 3 yrs.
• 200+ blog post on using WordPress and
online marketing
• Speaker at SMX Israel, WordCamp Europe
and more

Source: The State of the Word and Elegant Themes

Possible sub-header

THE PROCESS


Planning
WordPress Theme

Install & Configure
Content/ Marketing
QA
Launch
Just the beginning…

PLANNING


Goals – Why?
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Signup for beta
Signup for trial
Newsletter subscribers
Contact Us
Brand awareness, PR
Test product viability
Get customer feedback
Customer support

Goals – Who?
• Potential customers
• Potential investors
• Press / Media / Bloggers


Wireframe
Logo


Wireframe tools
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Wirify – turn any site into a wireframe
Powerpoint/Photoshop/Illustrator
Wireframe.cc
Mockingbird
Gliffy
Balsamiq
Mockflow

DESIGN YOUR SITE, OR PICK A
THEME

But first! Your brand


What is your brand?
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Logo – colors, style
Playful? Serious?
Enterprise? Consumer?
Technological? Friendly?


This theme sets the new standard
with endless possibilities

lots of awesome features.
SEO base built-in

multiple header designs to choose
from…choose from boxed and wide
mode
unlimited colors, 5 amazing sliders,
advanced portfolio and blog options, lots of
shortcodes, custom widgets
advanced typography options,
over 20+ PSDs included

What to look for
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Service/support
How is the homepage structured?
Internal page
Main blog page
Individual blog page
Category/tag/author/search
Built-in SEO? Bad!
<h1>, <title>
Responsive
Uses WP navigation

What you can know
Not everything. There will be surprises like:
• Bugs
• Missing features
• Bad service
• Deprecated functions


Good theme providers


HOSTING


What to look for
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WP experts
Updated version of PHP
Great amazing stupendous service
Backups
Cloud = nonsense
Uptime = nonsense
GoDaddy = Big no no

WordPress Managed Hosting


Shameless Plug

Illuminea provides managed hosting for WordPress sites.
Includes:
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Upgrades
Backups
Technical support
And more.

More info: http://illumineahost.com/ and
http://illuminea.com/services/wordpress-hosting-maintenancesupport/

Other options
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Bluehost
Dreamhost
Site5
Hostgator


INSTALL AND CONFIGURE


Delete “admin”


Site title & tagline


Email for notifications


No subscribers: Settings >
General – Security!


Settings > Reading


Settings > Discussion


Settings > Permalinks


PLUGINS


Keep an eye on your plugins


Important plugins
• Jetpack: social buttons, photo gallery,
auto-post to social networks
• Gravity Forms
• Spam Destroyer (Akismet alternative)
• WordPress SEO
• WooSidebars
• Backups – BackupBuddy, BackWPup,
VaultPress, ManageWP

Nice to haves
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CMS Tree Page View
Gravity Forms to Zoho CRM
Redirection
Limit login attempts
Tiny MCE Advanced
Scroll Triggered Box
Swiftype search
Wordfence

RESPONSIVE DESIGN


“…the number of smartphones in use
worldwide reached 1.038 billion units
during the third quarter of 2012.”
Source: Strategy Analytics, as quoted here.


When Facebook and Google
developers plan new features
and products, they think of
the mobile experience before
the desktop experience.
Source: Bruce Clay, June 2012


Google
Google supports smartphone-optimized sites in three
configurations:
1. Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that
serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with
each URL serving the same HTML to all devices
and using just CSS to change how the page is
rendered on the device. This is Google's
recommended configuration.
2. Sites that dynamically serve all devices on the
same set of URLs, but each URL serves different
HTML (and CSS) depending on whether the user
agent is a desktop or a mobile device.
3. Sites that have separate mobile and desktop
URLs.

Why according to Google
• Easier for your users to interact with, share,
and link to your content
• helps Google's algorithms assign the indexing
• No redirection needed to get to deviceoptimized view, reduces loading time
properties for the content
• User agent-based redirection is error-prone
• It saves resources for both your site and
Google's crawlers: Googlebot user agents
needs to crawl your pages once, as opposed
to crawling multiple times with different user
agents, to retrieve your content

Why according to me
• Branding
• Easier to manage and maintain
• More links to one URL - vast majority of
mobile URLs do not have inbound links
(Bing blog)


So what is it?


Minimum 2 Breakpoints
Mobile
@media only screen and (min-device-width :
320px) and (max-device-width : 480px) {
/* Styles */
}
Tablets
768px) and (max-device-width : 1024px) {
/* Styles */
}

Mobile Breakpoints
Mobile Portrait
@media only screen and (max-device-width
: 320px) {
/* Styles */
}
Mobile Landscape
321px) {
/* Styles */
}

Tablet Breakpoints
Tablet Portrait
@media only screen and (min-device-width : 768px) and
(max-device-width : 1024px) and (orientation : portrait) {
/* Styles */
}
Tablet Landscape
@media only screen and (min-device-width : 768px) and
(max-device-width : 1024px) and (orientation :
landscape) {
/* Styles */
}


Landscape
@media screen and (min-device-width:
480px) and (orientation: landscape) {
body {
font-size: 100%;
}
}


Page Load
Just 1 second of load time can drop
conversion by 7%. (Source)
• Conditional loading – if certain
conditions met, content (images,
media) is loaded
• Lazy loading - load media after the
initial page load


http://responsive.victorcoulon.fr/

http://responsive.is/

http://quirktools.com/screenfly/

http://responsinator.com/?url=commtouch.com

SECURITY


Pretty simple
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Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade
Hosting
No admin user, low user levels
Good passwords! “ilovemydog” = #fail
Close admin to subscribers
Backup regularly off server – Amazon
File permissions
Be careful with plugins and themes delete what you don’t need

PROMOTION


Semantic Data


More on-site optimization
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Breadcrumbs
Pagination
XML Sitemap
Google Data Highlighter
Google Analytics
Google Webmaster Tools


Getting WP Help
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‫וורדפרס בפייסבוק‬
‫וורדפרס הקבוצה החדשה בפייסבוק‬
WordPress support forums
WPGarage
Fantasktic - $99 per task


illuminea
http://illuminea.com ▪ http://wpgarage.com
@miriamschwab ▪ http://facebook.com/miriamschwab
Slides available at http://illum.in/ourpresentations

THANKS!


WordPress for Startups

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