WordPress, Magento & Web Design

Virtually all websites these days feature some sort of popup message designed to get the user’s attention and/or follow through on some kind of call to action.  These can be to sign up for a newsletter, agree to terms of use, to feature new products, services or content, or for any number of other reasons.  Your initial reaction to reading the above may very well be: “Yeah, those things are really annoying.”  And you’re not all wrong. They certainly can be annoying and oftentimes are.  But more importantly, research shows they are effective.  So the goal should be to maximize their effectiveness while minimizing the annoying factor.  Choosing to not use them altogether simply because you’ve been to a lot of sites with popups that annoy you will cause you to miss out on opportunities to actually improve the experience for your website users, and also ultimately improve your bottom line.  However, the purpose of this article is not to convince you of the utility or best practices with popups.  For a very thorough discussion on that, check out Sumo’s excellent write up.  What I want to share is the best method for setting up popups for your WordPress website, and for that the tool I most recommend is the Popup Maker plugin.

WordPress is the most popular content management system on the internet, but it wasn’t always that way. Back when it was first created, WordPress was just a blogging platform rather than a fully-fledged CMS. Blogging is still at the heart of WordPress; any Posts created in WordPress are by default displayed in chronological order in your site’s blog feed. But keep blogging long enough, and soon your main blog feed will get unruly, and your readers may have to dig through pages and pages of posts before finding the article they’re looking for. How do you organize a blog with hundreds of posts?

A standard WordPress installation offers two different post types: Posts and Pages. If you’ve never worked with WordPress before, you may be asking yourself, “What’s the difference?” Both posts and pages have nearly identical editing interfaces, and at a glance, it is not obvious when to use each post type. If you find yourself asking these questions, you’ve come to the right place. In this post, we’re going to break down the differences between WordPress posts and pages and give you the confidence you need to know when to use each one.