Wordpress Website Development Services in USA

Did you know that a website can take your business to a level you have never imagined! WordPrax is a leading WordPress Web Development company with so many years of experience of creating the best websites for the clients.

Facts speak out louder. Here is the WordPrax factsheet:

● 50,000 Wordpress based web applications, themes, plugins and websites have been created by the masterly team at WordPrax.

● The clients of WordPrax are spread across almost 25+ countries. That is a rare feet. Isn’t?

Success in business is only possible when you choose a digital partner which has a lot of expertise up the sleeve.

5 Popular WordPress Marketplaces for WordPress development

WordPress is the most popular open source Content Management System (CMS) that lets the website developers across the world to create customized websites easily for business as well as for personal needs. WordPress also helps the developers to make use of the readymade themes available and then customize them accordingly. Isn’t it an amazing thing?

Well, WordPress surely empowers around 29% of the total websites around the world. It is a kind of powerhouse that makes the websites come alive with some very dynamic features and functionalities as well. All thanks to the open-sources of this website development platform. 

What comes in handy when a developer gets started with WordPress development is the availability of the themes in the marketplaces which are really popular as below listed:

Ultimate List of 5 WordPress Development Marketplaces is:

   1. Automattic:

Certainly the best company website which was founded by WordPress co-founder, Matt Mullenweg. If you have had known WordPress for years, you would probably know that Automattic empowers WordPress.com, that gives capability to the website designers across the world to create self-hosted websites or blogs easily and in a hassle-free manner. This is the power of WordPress development with WordPress.com. Services like Akismet, WooCommerce, Polldaddy, Gravatar etc. are also founded by Automatic. It is interesting to note that they are also contributing to the growth of WordPress.org CMS and BuddyPress. Of course, we can call it a leader in the industry.

   2. Pagely

Pagely is the first managed WordPress hosting platform. Amazon Cloud empowers their robust architecture server. This allows you to have the same best-in-class performance, redundancy, and scalability that is available to the biggest brands in the world without having to deal with any of the technical details.

   3. Yoast

Who has not heard about Yoast? It is probably the best SEO Plugin ever available in the WordPress plugin directory. Now the WordPress developers can easily optimize their website with SEO, no hassles at all! One can easily utilise the settings in Yoast and make their website powerful with SEO. Yoast is a company that also deals in auditing services and their clients are some of the very powerful companies across the globe. 

   4. Web Dev Studios:

Another leading name in the WordPress development industry, Web Dev Studios is a premier agency which caters to the WordPress development needs of the web visitors. They are not only great in development but also WordPress designing projects for sure. Very much active in the WordPress community, they have several books as resources on WordPress and they have already worked for big names such as NBC and Microsoft.  So, you can join their community today and make use of the resources available online. Custom Post Types is one of their very famous plugins of WordPress.

   5. Themify:
 
An ultimate marketplace that is the favorite of the WordPress Developers and designers because of the themes and plugins that are available in their online shop. The best part of this online shop is the availability of the themes in various categories, which helps the developers to choose the theme according to the business of the client and the website that is needed with particular functionalities and features. They have a subscription program for the users of the website so that they can access all the WordPress resources at one place.

Conclusion:

So, we discussed some of the very popular marketplaces to buy WordPress themes or the agencies to contact to get WordPress development services. These all are very popular in terms of their quality of the products as well as services and one can rely on these digital marketplaces with no doubts. 

What Basic Skills are Required to Build a WordPress Website?

WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) available and it has been used to build millions of websites all over the world. As per an estimate, about 30% of all the websites on internet have been built using WordPress alone. The major reasons for WordPress popularity are its user-friendliness nature, being easily customizable and absolutely free to use. Whether you want to set up a simple personal blog, business blog to show off your products or want to build any other kind of website, WordPress is a great place for beginners to start building websites.

Good thing about WordPress is that you can even customize your WordPress theme and do Wordpress Plugin Development to build a custom and advanced WordPress site with lots of features and functionalities. That means, it is not much difficult to use WordPress to develop amazing websites. Even if you don’t have expert coding skills still you can use WordPress to build a website. if you are just starting out to create WordPress websites, you only need some basic skills and need to follow the steps given below to be able to create your first and then other types of WordPress websites easily.

●  Doing Thorough Initial Research

First step in building WordPress website is to do research and collect all the available information about WordPress. If you do your homework right, then it will save lots of your time later on. By this way, you will also come to know about the WordPress platform’s features, power, flexibility and potential. Let’s discuss some of the features of WordPress. 

●  WordPress has an incredibly easy-to-use user interface. 

●  Even if you don’t have much coding knowledge still you can set up a website without any problem. 

●  But more than a website, WordPress is a content-publishing platform. 

●  WordPress makes it very easy to update new content and attract visitors. 

●  WordPress is also a SEO friendly platform and has many SEO related features which help in getting higher search engine ranking of the websites. 

●  WordPress also has a huge developer community support. This community helps a lot the new WordPress users in resolving their issues.

Hence if you have good research skills, you can start with WordPress. By this way, you will be able to read a lot, ask questions and get help from the WordPress’s community of users and will be able to build an amazing WordPress website.

●  Planning in Advance
After doing the initial research on WordPress, the next step is to do proper planning before starting building your WordPress site. Before you install and set-up your website with WordPress, you need to take care of few things i.e.  you should do planning for these things in advance:-

●  Website name
●  Hosting Requirements
●  PHP and MySQL versions
●  Core update compatibility
●  Check Plugins and Themes compatibility
●  IDE or Text Editor
●  FTP Client Software
●  Web Browser
●  Content of the website

These were some of the things for which you have to do proper planning. This is an important step if you want to build a custom WordPress website.

●  WordPress Installation

Now you just need ability to follow the instructions. Installing WordPress is quite easy. Most of the web hosting providers now have tools to let you install WordPress automatically. You just need to follow below instructions for a five minute WordPress installation guide:-

●  Download the WordPress package and unzip it.
●  Create a database on your Web Server and also create a MySQL user.
●  Rename wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php. Edit this file and add to your database.
●  the WordPress file to your web server.
●  Access the URL using a web browser.

WordPress is now installed and you have a website which you can use for any purpose.

●  Doing Settings in WordPress 
After installing WordPress, next step is to customize WordPress as per your preference. WordPress has many features for setting up like creating the user profile, setting the site name, publishing posts, adding pages and categories. You can also change how your WordPress site looks like. You can choose from thousands of WordPress themes. You can even create your own theme. You can also add new plugins to your WordPress site. You can keep on learning more about WordPress.

●  Coding Skills
Even if you have basic knowledge, you can build a WordPress site. But for advanced users learning coding is also a good thing. It is better you learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and bit of SQL. If you want to customize your WordPress site, themes, and plugins then slowly slowly you need to gain expertise in these programming languages and skills.

Conclusion

As we have just discussed, building a WordPress website is not at all difficult. You just need to be able to do research, ability to learn, ability to do proper planning, ability to follow required steps for installation, settings and customization and have basic knowledge of some programming languages. After acquiring the basic knowledge of WordPress development, you can even go for advanced part by learning to write codes in HTML,CSS, JavaScript and PHP and can even become an expert WordPress developer in short period of  time.

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.