How to make sure your site is mobile friendly in a ‘mobile-first’ world

The world is dynamic, and people are moving from using desktops to using the Smartphone in finding information and communicating via the Internet. In lots of countries, the number of Smartphones in use is more than personal computers. All the more reason to make your site mobile friendly. A mobile friendly site is the one that has the correct display for handheld gadgets like tablets, Smartphones, iPhones, and iPads. The site also has minimized scrolling, easy to navigate, loads faster and avoids using flash. Making you site mobile friendly makes you visible to a wider pull of mobile users since your website will be visible in the search results depending on how well you have configured it. There are three things you should know when making a website accessible by a mobile phone user. Among them is:

Making it easy for you customers. The reason for creating a website is to provide information or products to a client. The reason why customers visit your website is to get information or the product faster. Making your site easy to navigate helps the customer complete their objective hence they are satisfied. A complicated website will only put them off and opt for one that provides solutions efficiently hence you lose traffic.
Making it efficient by how a customer completes common tasks. The site needs prioritization by starting with the significant and common tasks for clients on mobile devices. A site that supports these features allows easy completion of the tasks by helping the customers complete their search objectives. A unified experience across all platforms is also necessary.
Selecting a theme, template, or design that is consistent across all devices. This is the use of Responsive Web Design (RWD) where the page uses the same code and URL whether on a desktop or a mobile device. The only thing that should change is the display where it changes depending on the screen size of the gadget being used.

A website that is mobile friendly has to meet the following specifications:

Responsive to the size of the screen where one does not have to scroll horizontally to see full sentences.
Avoids use of software that are not common with mobile phones. An example of such a software is flash.
Places links far apart so that it is easy to tap without having to zoom the content.
Uses texts that are easy to read without one having to zoom on the screen.

There are three ways of configuring your website to be mobile friendly. They are Responsive web design, separate URL, and dynamic serving. The responsive web design as mentioned before uses the same URL and same HTML code across all devices, but the content is displayed on the screen differently depending on the screen size. Separate URL uses different URLs on different devices, where the configuration detects device in use then redirects it to the appropriate page. Dynamic serving, on the other hand, uses the same URL across all devices but different HTML code for different devices based on the server’s knowledge of the user’s browser.

Make your site visible to a great pull of customers by configuring your site to be mobile friendly since a large number of people use mobile phones to browse and you do not want to miss on that. Optimizing your website helps your visitors keep reading rather than putting them off.

Once you put this into play and would like to check if Google itself deems you “mobile friendly” then head over to their free online tool here. The image on the right is the result you are looking for. Google will give you the “green light” in letting you know you have developed your website well for mobile web users.

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7 Easy Steps to Manually Install WordPress

With so many WordPress hosting services offering one-click installation, this article could be just one sentence long: click the ‘install’ button. This is not one of those articles. 

Instead, here you will learn how to manually install WordPress from your server’s control panel. So, roll up your sleeves and let’s dig in!

Prep Work

Before you jump right in, here are some things you will need:

1. FTP (File Transfer Protocol) or Shell Access: Because you will be uploading files to the server. You can find several options on the web, some don’t even require a download. Make sure that you have an account set up with a login ID and password for the FTP, too.

2. Text Editor: This is not going to be pretty GUI work. You’ll be entering some code behind the scenes and to do that, a text editor is in order. Your PC or Mac has default text editors (Notepad and TextEdit); however, if you want a few more bells and whistles, grab an after-market model online. You can find a list of recommended options on the WordPress site.

3. Credentials to Login to the Host Control Panel: Since you’ll be installing WordPress on the back-end, make sure you have access to the cPanel, which is where you’re going to set up the database.

WordPress Installation Station

You are now ready to install WordPress with 7 easy steps!

1. Download WordPress: First, get the latest version of the open source WordPress software to ensure stability and security. 

2. Login to the cPanel: Use your credentials.

3. Click on the database link: It’s probably called MySQL or Databases.

4. Set up the database and create a user ID and password: Now is probably a good time to remind you to write down all of the IDs and passwords that you’ll create; you will be using them throughout the install.

5. Edit the wp-config.php: Pull out the text editor for this part of the job. Enter the database name, username and password from the previous step, database host, and table prefix. Don’t worry; there are explanations next to each field for guidance. You’ll also be asked to set up secret keys to provide security for your site.

6. Fill the empty database with files: Login to the FTP of your choice and find the directory where you are going to put WordPress. Normally, it’s at the root folder – especially if it’s going to be your homepage. If you need to know how to install WordPress on a subdomain, make sure to select that particular directory; however, it will not be directly accessible from the homepage. Now, open the WordPress folder and upload the files individually to the proper root or subdomain.

7. Run the install script from your site: You are right at the finish line! Go to the install page. Here, you will be prompted to name your new WordPress page, create the administrator username and password, and provide a communication email. Click the "Install WordPress" button and you are ready to rock-n-roll! 

Install Globally, Test Locally

There’s a common misconception that you need to install WordPress locally on your own computer. This is not necessary for administrative reasons; you can always login from your computer to make edits and other changes. However, local installation does allow for you to play around with different themes, see how various plugins may work, or perform other tests. So, if you have the wherewithal to create your own local practice lab, go right ahead! Your full-service site may be the better off. Just know that it is merely an option, not a requirement.

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What Are The Key Advantages Of High-Availability VPS?

For a number of years, Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting has been a sweet spot between the affordability of Shared Hosting and the operational power of a Dedicated Server. The introduction of cloud infrastructures has taken that concept, and extended it even further. We recently introduced some new features to our VPS Hosting plans that essentially give you a number of the benefits of cloud hosting, without any increase in cost. Here’s a look at some of the new cloud-inspired features we have added to make our Virtual Private Server Hosting more powerful than it has even been.

What is high-availability?

Our new and improved infrastructure is setup with a network of clusters in a virtualized environment, each of which contains a number of different highly available servers. These clusters all contain redundant hardware, so if your node fails for any reason, all of your data and files will be safeguarded, and your partition will spin up instantaneously on a different node. Essentially, the new high-availability provides your partition with real-time redundancy.

New Easy Server Controls

In addition to high-availability, our new VPS product comes with a “Manage my Cloud” functionality in your AMP. From this page you can do the following:

1. Monitor your resource usage with graphs

    - RAM
    - CPU
    - Bandwidth
    - Disk Space
2. Restart Server
3. Change Root Password
4. View your Server Details
5. Access cPanel
6. Access WHM

For more information on new controls and resource dashboard click here.

New Snapshot Rollbacks: Instantly revert to a previous stable snapshot of files & processes

Many businesses today find their recovery and backup processes strained as data growth in the enterprise Information Technology environment continues to speed up at exponential rates. Backup performance is crippled by the needs of online and up-to-date business applications.

Our new snapshots feature allows you to make a copy of data at the point in time of initiating that copy in order to back it up without impacting or interrupting systems, as a traditional VPS backup does. In short, our high-availability service offers you the ability to restore your data to a specific point in time, whenever needed.

Use case scenarios for snapshot rollbacks:

1. Application upgrades (most common) 

• - Say, for instance, you upgrade to the latest version of WordPress and your site fails to function correctly afterward. You can easily revert back to the working version of your site within minutes by reverting back to a snapshot made prior to the update.

2. Security issues

• - If your site gets hacked or malicious code is injected into your CMS, you can revert to a snapshot made on a regular basis and then patch up the holes.

3. Development bugs

• - If you are a developer in a staging environment and are about to roll out some new code, we recommend creating a snapshot, rolling out the code and reverting easily back to a stable version if the implementation causes other bugs around the site.

These are just some of the scenarios you may face where the new snapshot feature may come in handy on a self-serve basis.

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