Important Steps to Becoming a Best WordPress Developer

Learning anything be it WordPress or anything else, it needs hard work, commitment, lots of energy and of-course time. If you are looking of something which can make you an expert of WordPress overnight then probably you are not on the right path. And here we are not only talking about WordPress experts but the Best WordPress developers. 

Installing WordPress, reading few tutorials and customizing few themes can make you at the most an expert WordPress developer but the best developers move beyond the basics and reaches to the boundary of what they are learning to find the crux of the thing. Moreover they innovate and contribute to the community and show their mastery and expertise in the work they do. Hence lets now discuss about how to become a best WordPress developer.

●  Daily Reading About WordPress
If you want to become the best WordPress developer then you should read and study daily at-least 1-2 hours. Leaning and mastering WordPress can take some time. Reaching to the top takes commitment and sacrifice and you have to cut your time for TV, Playing Games, Mobiles, Surfing web etc and focus more on reading any material about WordPress. Make notes of whatever you learn each day on this way and revise them regularly and as you start to see some success then put in more time and effort in reading. 

●  Join the WordPress Community and Participate in Forums
As you continue to learn WordPress and also put what you have learned into practical projects, the next step is to become an active member of the WordPress communities and forums. If you are becoming a fantastic WordPress programmer or developer then it is better to talk to the WordPress developers in the community, share your experiences, solve their online queries along the way. You can also ask your doubts in these communities and it will help you a lot in the journey of becoming the best WordPress developer.

●  Follow the Masters of WordPress Development 

We become like those which we follow. If you want to become the best WordPress programmer or developer then start spending time with and reading about those who are at the top in WordPress development. You can know about these people from the WordPress communities and internet search. Follow them on Twitter, Read their blogs, give feedback on their thoughts and ideas, go to WordCamps to even meet them, read their interviews and listen to their talks.

●  Understand the Technology Behind WordPress
If you are going to master WordPress development then you need to understand and learn about the technology behind WordPress. You have to learn basic programming in PHP and MySQL as it is important to know PHP and MySQL if you want to understand WordPress core. Don’t read the out-dated tutorials regarding these rather go for the updated and latest tutorials so that your skills remain up-to-date. Also explore the WordPress codebase and read the documentation to understand how things work. Follow the discussions about WordPress Core, Plugins and Themes to start with.

●  Do The Homework
Now it is time to put what you are learning into practice. Start with your own WordPress websites. After reading a tutorial, do the practicals and do the experiments. Track what you have learned and make notes of it for future reference. Spend lots of time on implementing what you have learned into real projects. You can further explore these areas:-

●  WordPress APIs
●  Ajax in WordPress
●  WordPress PHP Classes

●  Do WordPress Projects for Clients
Working for clients whether it is free or paid is one of the best ways to learn so many things and gain experience. Working on these projects will make you learn how to overcome challenges and hurdles. Initially you can start with the small clients and later take on the large clients. The main goal is to get few hundreds to few thousands hours of working on WordPress to get real world experience.

●  Develop Public Themes, Plugins and Patches

This is the real test. Build a theme and release it, paid or free. Check the feedback and improve on it. As you must have required something - some feature or functionality, do the plugin development. Write a plugin which is secure and which solves a real world problem. Release it and check the feedback. Learn how to submit a patch. Look for a challenge that you can tackle. Contributing a patch will give you invaluable experience and will take you much forward to become a best WordPress developer.

Conclusion

If you want to become a best WordPress developer then you have to become self confident and strong and should follow the above procedure daily and regularly. You have to do the needed hard work. You have to start from the education and then move onto the real world experience of doing projects. Finally you will get the title of Best and Top WordPress Developer from the WordPress Community itself.

How to Do Image Optimization in WordPress Site?

WordPress offers so many benefits when you build a website using WordPress CMS. That’s why it is the most popular CMS platform available in the market to build the websites as almost 30% of of all the websites on internet have been built using WordPress. So many people also search on internet about how to improve the performance and speed of their WordPress site. There are many ways to improve the current state of your WordPress Developer website. But there are some things which you need to focus on to improve the user experience on your site.

Good companies which do Wordpress Website Development always advice their clients to optimize the images which they want to use on the WordPress site. You should focus on the details to come up with a good solution. The most important thing that you need to focus on while creating a WordPress site is to optimize your images properly. You should do thorough research to improve things and choose the right optimizing tool to optimize images on your site.

If you don’t know about the tools to optimize your WordPress site then read this post as in this we will be sharing with you few important ways by which you can optimize the images of your WordPress site. Let’s explain these for you here:-

●  Format of Files Matters A Lot

The important thing to note is that the file formats of the images matter a lot. If the file size is big then it will affect the loading speed of the website. Thus you can change the file formats to decrease the size of the images so that your website can load fast. There are many file formats available and you should do thorough research to improve the speed of your site. The most commonly used file formats are JPEG and PNG. These file formats offer the good site speed as they help in decreasing the size of the images. 

If you are creating an image in Photoshop then you must change the file format of the images finally. It will help you to improve the things and your website will load much faster. You should use these standard file formats when you upload the images on your WordPress site.

●  Optimize Images Before Uploading Them on Your WordPress Site

There are many ways to optimize your website images and many tools available online to optimize images by reducing their sizes. You just need to make sure that by this process the quality of the images remain intact. The various online tools which you can use can optimize the images before uploading them on your WordPress site. You just have to set the size of the images on that tool and then it will scale the images according to the right size.  After the scaling you can post them on your WordPress site although the quality of the image will be impacted a bit. If you have to display a large image on your WordPress site then make sure that the image is pixel perfect and that it is optimized perfectly. If you want a quality image for your site and you also want to optimize it then you can use such graphical editing software available for this purpose online.

●  Optimizing Images After Posting Them on Your WordPress Website

If you have not optimized the images before uploading them on your WordPress site then you can do so even after uploading them by using some plugins which have been created for these purposes only. Once these images are optimized, your WordPress site will become quite fast and show good performance. The most popular plugin for doing this job is WP_Smush.it. You can optimize your uploaded images on your WordPress site by using this plugin. 

Conclusion
We have just discussed various ways of optimization the images on your WordPress website i.e by changing the format of file or by optimizing the images before uploading them onto the WordPress site or by using a plugin to optimize the images which have already been uploaded on the WordPress site. It is important to do the optimization of the images as you want your WordPress site to load quickly so that the visitors get good user experience while using your site. You should explore all options available to come at the best solution as per the needs of your WordPress site.

Migrating Your Website to WordPress from Any other Platform

As per latest reports, Almost 31 % of all the websites on internet are powered by WordPress. WordPress is increasingly becoming the content management system (CMS) of choice for all kinds of users. But what about the websites which have been built without a CMS? Is the process of migrating to WordPress very difficult and time consuming? The answer to this question is that migrating a website over to WordPress is actually much easier than what you think. In this article, I will discuss about the migration process and i will also tell you about some of the challenges you might face. 

First think is that if you have decided to do HTML to wordpress migration and want to migrate your current website into WordPress then it is a wise choice. WordPress is trusted by millions of people and businesses from all over the world. Now I will tell you about the detailed overview of how to go for this migration from any website to WordPress.



Migrating from Another CMS

If your website is already based on a CMS then you can use a WordPress plugin for migration process. You can check the WordPress Plugin Repository or look for some online tutorials.


Migrating from a Static Website

The task of manually migrating your website to WordPress is bit difficult and very important. By this you will get the following benefits :-

● You will have greater control over your site’s content.

● Migrating your site manually to WordPress will give you a solid understanding of WordPress features.

Building a Migration Plan
WordPress stores content in the form of posts and pages and organizes them using categories and tags. Thus the aim of our content reorganization plan is to structure it in terms of posts and pages and categorize them using tags and categories.

We will plan our new WordPress website Development under the following headings:-

● Reorganize Existing Content
● Choose the Right Web Hosting
● Plan New Site Structure
● Keep Track of SEO changes
● Contact Forms and Spam
● Pick a Theme
● Backups
● Security

How to Do the WordPress Migration Process?

Below is the step by step process of WordPress migration plan:-

● Take a Backup of your current website.

● If you are installing WordPress in the same web host then create a maintenance page and rename is to index.html.

● Now install a fresh copy of WordPress.

● If you had created an index.html file in previous step then delete it now.

● Just log in to your WordPres dashboard and disable search engine visibility. This will prevent your content from the search engines until you organize your website properly.

● Now start importing the content from your previous CMS. Learn from the official WordPress codex to learn how to migrate from your CMS to WordPress. 

● If you have been using a static site then you have to do it manually. You need to copy paste each page in your old website. Understand the difference between posts and pages as it will help you to organize your content better.

● Now after your content is imported you have to structure it. Create the required categories, sub-categories, widgets, tags and menus. After that organize your content accordingly. With this your content importing is completed.

● Now install the WordPress theme and the important plugins. Also install a contact form, anti-spam, backup and security plugin. You don’t need to install SEO plugin as WordPress’ inbuilt SEO is quite powerful itself.

● Now run and check your website through the Google Mobile Friendly Test and Page load Test. If the results are good that means your chosen WordPress theme is also good. This completes your quality assurance test.

● Now build a sitemap. Sitemaps are important part of any website. After you finish structuring your content, you can use any available sitemap generating plugin to quickly generate a sitemap of your WordPress site.

● Now fix all of the broken links.

Finally just go live and enable search engine visibility.

Conclusion

We have just discussed the overview and the process of doing WordPress migration. If you have made this decision of migrating to WordPress site then it is your one of the best decision. WordPress offers so many benefits and it can easily handle all of the requirements of a web master and website owner. After migrating, your WordPress site will definitely give you fruitful results and will bring more visitors and potential customers to your WordPress site thus boosting your business.

A Guide for Converting Your PSD to WordPress Theme

Right now WordPress powers around 27% of all the websites on internet. Such a high popularity of WordPress is due to the fact that it offers lots of benefits to the website owners as well as to the visitors. If you still have not decided whether to switch to WordPress or not then we suggest you to do this quickly if you are really serious about doing something big and impactful in your online business or blog through the WordPress website. For this, first you need to have PSD files which are created by Adobe Photoshop. After that you can Convert PSD files into WordPress Themes. But converting PSD into WordPress can be a bit tricky if you don’t know how to do it. This article can help you in this regard. Here we will discuss the important points you need to know or the steps you need to take while converting your PSD into pixel perfect WordPress website. 

● Slicing Your PSD file

The process of converting your PSD to WordPress theme starts with slicing your PSD file and dividing it into Separate image files so that each of the design component is carefully saved as a separate design file. You can use photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop to slice your PSD files. Also you should plan for what are the things which you will need to load as an image in your webpages. You have to try to optimize the images and determine what needs to be static and what needs to be dynamic.
Slicing will give you these components:-

● Background
● header and separator
● Footer and others

You should be very careful while slicing your components and it should be pixel perfect otherwise the final page will have the problem.

● Creating Index.html and Style.css

In this step, you will reach the programming part from the designing part and it is very simple. From the PSD design which you have created, now create a static HTML and CSS template and name the files index.html and Style.css for future use. Although you can use Software tools like Dreamweaver to do this step but learning a bit of HTML and CSS will also be very helpful. You can learn the basic tutorials from the websites like W3Schools, TutPlus or developer communities.  Now place your images and sliced up components at the right positions with the help of index.html and the related CSS file. You should follow a responsive web design to make sure that your site looks good and works on all the screens.

● Break Down Your index.html into WordPress theme file structure

Now you have basic template which you need to be ported to WordPress. WordPress has a file structure which you need to follow. You have to upload your web pages to WordPress themes and the plugins and more functionalities can be added. Hence go by WordPress standard file structure and break your index.html file into required .php files. Two major files in WordPress theme are index.php and style.css. There are also many PHP files like header.php, archive.php, sidebar.php, footer.php etc.

Basic files of WordPress theme

● index.php
● header.php
● sidebar.php
● footer.php

Some more related files are:-

● style.css
● rtl.css
● index.php
● comments.php
● front-page.php
● home.php
● single.php
● page.php
● category.php
● tag.php
● date.php
● archive.php
● search.php
● attachment.php
● image.php
● 404.php

● Add WordPress tags

Now import the amazing inbuilt functionalities provided in WordPress into your theme files with the help of WordPress tags. After adding these tags, you can say that you have created a WordPress theme.

Now follow the below given link to know the available WordPress template tags:-

 http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags

Now place all of the files into a single folder and place it inside the /wp-content/themes/folder which you can found in your WordPress installation.
Now activate your custom theme from WordPress dashbaord.

● Add Functionalities

Till now you have created your own custom WordPress theme from a PSD file. Now you can dd more functionalities to your theme by installing various plugins. You can learn JavaScript to add more features to your theme.

Conclusion

We have just discussed the simple process of converting a PSD template into a WordPress theme. Although the process is simple but if you find it little tricky then you can take help of expert WordPress developers. A developer who is experienced, skilled and has more knowledge of themes will certainly convert your PSD file into a high performance WordPress website.

Best 7 web development companies you should hire

There’s no doubt about the fact that web development is the most demanded and lucrative career these days. Nowadays, it’s all about the digital presence on the web world so that the people around the world can easily find you and your brand. After all, it’s all about identity and branding on the internet.

 So, to fulfil the digital needs of an organisation or a brand, it’s necessary to hire a professional web development company at the very onset of when you look for creating a website for your brand/ organisation/ company.

We have made an exclusive list of the best 7 web development companies which are compiled on the basis of these factors:

● Reviews, ratings and client feedbacks.

● Types of services rendered by the companies.

● Portfolio of the web development company.

Let’s have a look at the list of the best Web Development Companies now:

1. OSSMedia:

If we talk about the niches of OSSMedia web development company, we can say that they are professionals in WordPress, Drupal, Joomla! And Magento as well. End-to-end top-notch WordPress solutions- as they say themself and what their portfolio speaks out loud is that they want to skyrocket the business of their clients by providing solutions which are scalable as well as best in the industry.

An experienced and client-focussed team of developers have successfully rendered 10,000 projects in past 5+ years which is a rare feet.

For Top 10 WordPress web development companies, read here, we have grabbed the 1st rank since 2015.

2. Designs2HTML:

They have been in the market for around 6 years and we can say by having an overview on their website that it is a giant web development company in the market. They have been serving diversified clients from across the world.

● Dedication is beyond comparison

● 3500+ clients

● Deadline adherence

● Tailor-made websites for each client

● Unparalleled quality

● 24*7 assistance

● Great portfolio!

3. Markupcloud:

Definitely deserving a place in this list, we see that this US-based web development company provides best services to their clients in the niches like WordPress, PSD to Drupal and more! We love the portfolio that they have put up on the site. Workflow and organisation skills are all you can expect from them. What actually makes us praise about them are the reviews put up by their clients.

4. Eight25media

A one-of-it’s-kind web development company which has won awards for their great delivery of websites to their clients, They are actually from Japan but now based in Silicon Valley. They give 180-days free support to their clients along with a dedicated manager to handle the big and the small of a project. Voted as the number 1 agency in San Francisco, it seems to be a really trustworthy company.



5. Macrosoft

 Ranked #5 on the list, this company is focused on providing cost-effective yet productive web development services to their global clients all the way from small startups to giant companies. AS we see a great list of clients of them on the website- named American Electric Power, Entrust, Green Mountain Energy and others.

 6. Baymediasoft

 If we talk about the USP of Baymediasoft, it is the client satisfaction that has won the hearts of their customers in USA and abroad. This California-based company has 500 clients from across the world. It is a good web development company specialising in customized services.


7. Webdevstudios


A service provider- the team at Webdev Studios provide unique customization services to their clients in a very timely manner. For quality-driven and user-friendly experiences for the business and the company for which the website is being built.


Winding Up:

 So, here was the exclusive list of the top 7 best web development companies. Take a wise decision so that you don’t squander your hard-earned money at all!

What’s in store for WordPress developers with “Gutenberg”?

WordPress is an extremely popular CMS which comes with some extraordinary features! With the popularity, always comes the rumours and the contradictions when something new is introduced and it faces mixed reactions from the cult fan following. 

What the Twitter #WPdrama is all about?

Similar things are happening around WordPress which introduced a cutting-edge editor- “Gutenberg” coined after a renowned German printer and publisher/ goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg. This welcomed mixed feelings from the WordPress developers all around the world. 

The conflict is all about the ‘love and hate relationship’ with WordPress and new introductions in the latest versions of WordPress but Gutenberg is quite a revolutionary editor. 

Pros and Cons of all New Gutenberg WordPress Editor:

As everyone who has stuck with WordPress for quite a few years must be knowing that the WordPress content editor has remained more or less the same for years! Minute changes here and there and it has remained almost the same. Maybe, that is the reason that not everyone was able to digest the major changes that were introduced by WordPress a short ago! More advanced layouts and those pretty little blocks, we will talk about it all…

The truths and the myths. What’s hot, what’s not?

Let’s peep into the pros and cons of the whole new WordPress editor “Gutenberg” (a very thoughtfully crafted name!) below:

● Pros of WordPress “Gutenberg”:

1. Medium Style Editing Experience:

Are you one of those few WordPress developers who like the medium style editing experience in WordPress, then this editor is for you! You asked, and WordPress listened.

2.Less Dependence on TinyMCE:

It has been TinyMCE which was fundamental in editing the content by the content publishers. Seems like it will get little sidelined as of now. 

3.More Void Screen Space:

We all need space. Indeed. That has what WordPress seems to have listened. With all new Gutenberg, there is a lot of space on the screen letting you breathe and break that Writer’s block in case you need it. 

4.New Alignment Options for Blocks:

There are advanced layout options as well as hassle-free alignment options for those little useful blocks. Larger resolution screens and responsive sites are now easier to manage with advanced alignment options. 

5.Fully Responsive Editor:
 
Thank God that Gutenberg is a fully responsive editor for WordPress website development. Works great on a smartphone to let you edit and publish on the go! A lot of us will be seen using it a lot!

6.Custom Block Development:

WordPress theme development as well as WordPress plugin development is easier with Custom block development in the Gutenberg editor. The team at WordPress knows that everyone loves their custom requirements fulfilled.    

7.Beginner-friendly:

Perhaps, one of the best things about this editor is that it is beginner-friendly. As we always say- Keep learning until you are with WordPress. It will go a long way down the pipeline.

● Cons of WordPress “Gutenberg”:

1.Solid Support Unavailable:

Unfortunately, what pisses us off here is that there is no instant support available for this editor as of now as not many are into this editor (As it’s optional currently!). Let’s hope for the best in near future. 

2.May not seem beginner-friendly at times:

As all say, something that seems easy for someone, may not be a cakewalk for the other. Same holds true here. Some beginners can find it hard to learn working on this editor. 

3.Responsive Columns not supported:

Ah! That’s a pain. The new Gutenberg doesn’t support responsive columns yet. The users of WordPress have to install visual builder plugins and shortcode plugins as an alternate for the same.

4.Accessibility of Gutenberg is a concern:

The developer of the very famous plugin Yoast SEO came up with his concern upon the accessibility of Gutenberg. How to use this editor with a screen reader and on different devices...The issues are indeed big as far as the WordPress customization experience is concerned.

5.It wouldn’t be Optional Soon:

What can actually affect the people’s lives who have been stuck with WordPress from the start is that this may not be optional anymore as it is right now. Maybe and probably you might not have the option to turn it off. Maybe, it can become a hassle for you. Who knows?

To Conclude, life became hard for some people when Gutenberg got introduced. Even to this extreme that users have started to question their own life choices because they aren’t simply ready to hold on to the new editor. No doubt, this #WPdrama will continue to add more chapters to the struggle. 

How to Convert HTML to WordPress using Top Tools?

Now due to their immense benefits and use, there is a huge demand for professionally designed and attractive websites and the interest for HTML websites has gone away suddenly. The businesses who are running websites for their business always want to earn maximum profit with minimum investment. Hence they want fully functional and awesome websites so that the visitors can find the desired information easily on their site and the businesses can offer their product and services easily for the visitors or the customers to buy from their site. If you are already running a HTML website then creating a new website may not be a good option as it will cost lots of money and needs resources and staff to complete the website development and maintenance. So what you can do is bring your existing website on the WordPress platform. 

For this you must go for HTML to WordPress conversion service without any delay. HTML to WordPress theme conversion is a process by which you can convert your HTML website into WordPress site. By doing this you can transform your website, give it a new look, add new features and functionalities as per your requirements and also you can run it smoothly with less investment and efforts.

Due to the huge demand for WordPress sites, most of the web developers work under pressure of creating high quality WordPress website continuously. Therefore the chances of errors get increased if you work under pressure and stress from the project manager as well as from the clients. If you want to improve your work efficiency while converting HTML websites into WordPress then better you can use tools which can make this process easier for you. Now we will discuss about such tools for converting HTML sites into WordPress themes.

CMS2CMS: An Automated HTML to WordPress Content Migration Tool

Now every one on internet especially someone from digital marketing background knows the huge importance of quality and original content on the website as your success in the web based business depends on the quality content you continuously publish on your website which attract the audience and customers to your site. If your website has many contents then its migration to a new platform is not easy but this plugin CMS2CMS can help you in this regard. You can use this plugin to take all of your content of HTML website to WordPress website easily and smoothly. It also helps you to maintain the SEO ranking of your website on major search engines even after you have completed the migration process. This plugin also helps in migration of metadescriptions, metadata, keywords and a redirect from the existing HTML website to a new WordPress site.

Theme Matcher - Best and Free Converter tool/website

Theme Matcher is a gift for all of those people or businesses which want to convert their HTML websites to WordPress platform without editing any code or taking anyone’s help to complete this process. In their website, you just need to enter your website address, choose the appropriate area and that’s it, you are done. Theme Matcher extracts the images, layout and styles from your existing HTML website and creates the basic WordPress theme. This tool cannot create website menus hence you have to do that work yourself after converting your HTML website into WordPress platform.

HTML to WordPress Converter - Most Popular Premium Tool

It is a premium WordPress plugin which you can download from Codecanyon website by paying $19. It is very easy to use and can help you to convert the HTML interface to WordPress. It can identity the compositions sidebar, menus, header and footer thus helping you to create an amazing WordPress theme without any difficulty. During the HTML to WordPress conversion process using this plugin, you need to put the tags around content in HTML files as per your requirements. Hence in order to use this plugin properly you need to have a solid command over HTML language.

Conclusion

Looking at so many benefits of WordPress site there is no need for you to use your traditional HTML site as it don’t generate that much traffic on your site and don’t attract so many customers easily. Hence you can use any of the above discussed tools to migrate your HTML site into WordPress theme and get lots of customers and boost your business.