Situations Every WordPress Site Owner Must Avoid

For all the wordpress site owners out there, including yourself, you must have been using WordPress CMS for some time now and must be very familiar with managing your WP driven website in and out. As per the official figures of WordPress there are roughly 60 million sites floating on the web that are powered by WordPress and still growing. There are some situations that many of the WP owners find themselves into repeatedly and every time it pinches them heavily. This article largely talks about these recurring mistakes, situations being created because of these silly mistakes and how these could be avoided.

These mistakes are so easy to make, doesn’t look a big deal but are a must to avoid. Our effort is to bring these situations in forefront to ensure that you can keep them at bay and your wordpress development effort pays you the complete dividend.

Admin Username as ‘admin’

This is the most common mistake of all and has been into practice since years. By default the WordPress administrator’s console has the username ‘admin’ and this is created automatically upon installation. Hackers looking for their prey do not take time in looking for this very predictable username and gives them an open invitation to conduct their act. If such a username is combined with a loosely written password then the hacker would thank you for making their tasks a cakewalk. Solution is again simple, ask your wordpress development company to change the default username to something that you want and have a strong

password that needs to be updated periodically.

Data Loss/ Virus Attack

What can be more basic than taking a back up of your WordPress website but the fact of the matter is that a lot of WP owners forget doing even this. They might take lot of precautions of safety and implement plugins based secure system but in technology, you can never be too sure. As said, hope for the best but prepare for the worst, they manage to hope for the best by take precautionary steps but dont prepare for the worst in form of a backup. It takes quality effort and time to prepare site’s data which could be in form of product description or ever increasing blogs, a sudden loss could result in backdrop by several years, loss of business & reputation. The solution is very simple, take a periodic backup of your site either manually or automatically using available plugins at preset intervals.

Nothing comes for Free and not even WordPress Themes

Free themes are always attractive but someone has said it rightly, there are no free lunches in this world. These free themes bring alongside a range of problems and saving few dollars ($$) upfront might prove really costly later on. Such free downloaded theme are often unstable, sometimes contain malicious code, back links to the original hacker of the theme, no authentic support and are not updated.

We have discussed the situation and now let’s focus on the solution, which is again simple. It’s your business and your web identity, go on spend some money to buy a premium theme that can lay a strong foundation going forward. Also remember to purchase them from a reputed company like Template Monster, WooThemes etc which are into operation from years.

Poor SEO Results – XML sitemap missing

You made a beautiful wordress site, use best-in-class PSD to WordPress conversion companies and are putting decent effort to achieve good SEO results, but results somewhat poor than what as anticipated. Another silly mistake that is found to exist is a missing XML sitemap.

An XML sitemap can be visualized as a table of content in a book which guides the Google crawlers to all the pages that you want it to index, informs it about how often you want to re-index the page and let it know whenever a change is introduced. Even for WordPress sites not having an XML sitemap, Google crawlers still crawl them but in this event there are chances that some pages are missed. Solution is to ensure that an XML sitemap should also be implemented.    

Poor Categorization and Tagging

Nothing can be sillier than a poor utilization of tags and categories. If used well, categories and tags usually come handy and play a role in increasing traffic and user engagement. Wise use of categorization and tagging of your posts will not only facilitate an easy navigation for your online visitors as they’ll be able to find what they want but will also do a lot of good to your onpage SEO. A simple way of implementing this is to avoid multiple tags and categories to your blog. Recommendation would be to link each post to a single category and only relevant tags to be added.

This is not an exhaustive list of common situations that arise due to silly mistakes but certainly some of the frequent and most observed mistakes found. Take care of them and enjoy your online experience.

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Rejuvenate Your Traditional Business With WordPress

If you are still stuck into your brick-and-mortar business with trembling sales figures, high attrition rate, piling inventories, shouting vendors and are looking to rejuvenate it by leveraging the advantages of web, then WordPress is sure to come handy for you. It is a professional open source content management system (CMS) which is preferred world-wide for making websites of varied complexities. An organization's online identity is an important aspect on which organizations are spending millions of dollars as it portrays company vision, open a channel of communication between themselves and their current and prospective clients, provides a platform for showcasing products, new releases and announcement, and also an effective way to service its clients, can help an organization in communicating with its remotely located customers. WordPress website design services could be utilized to give shape to your online identity, which offers a powerful CMS, user-friendly administrative console for daily upkeep, professional and elegant themes to craft an effective and desired online identity. Today, companies across the globe have used Wordpress to create and manage impressive online identity.


Wordpress offers impressive features which has helped it come off a long way from a mere blogging platform with constant additions of new functions as per the changing trends. Some pf the peculiar advantages that wordpress brings to table is quick installation, easy maintenance, SEO support & friendly architecture, user-friendly administrative console for hassle free daily updates all by yourself, highly customizable to mach each business's unique requirements and much more. These, along with many other advantages have helped wordpress achieve the highest mind share among organizations looking for a CMS managed web solution.


In today's digital word, the social media is growing huge where millions of users log on daily and spend time on social networks thereby, making it an important aspect to be considered by marketers. Social networks has evolved as a new virtual space for social message exchange and social interaction. These new trends imply that your website must have features that allow you to engage your clients through social media. This integration will enable you to showcase your brand identity, business offerings and other promotions over social media platforms. This is where Wordpress comes handy as it offers exciting features for social media integration and your wordpress website design can easily accommodate the same.


One of the best features of Wordpress is its ability of customization and this is what has contributed a lot towards the popularity of wordpress. This allows you craft an exclusive custom look for your website and goes a long way in creating a corporate identity for your business. All you need to do is, to choose a professional wordpress development company which could understand your current brick-and-mortar business and visualize the required identity.


Traditional businesses have been vying for management based on lot of paper work which makes the job tedious and time-consuming. These businesses either do not or deploy a minimum use of computers in their business management activities. Wordpress not only helps these businesses take their product or service offering to the web but also assists them in automating lots of processes including, but not limited to, managing clients, lead management, invoicing, loyalty programs, performance reports, etc.


Therefore, you can count on the in numerous features provided by Wordpress and use them to your advantages, in order to transform your traditional business. Wordpress, being an open source platform, assists you in creating highly exclusive, robust and scalable website which would not only create your online business identity would would make your daily business operations smooth and easily manageable. The best part is, each time you to udate your site, edit content, add new pages, write blogs, you can do all of this, and lots more, all y your self without any need to go back to your web development company.

Designing Express is an experienced provider wordpress development in India and offers exception PSD to Wordpress conversion services.

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PSD to Magento Conversion: Attract more customers to your Online Shop

Over the past decade, online shopping has become increasingly popular and consumers across the world are searching and purchasing products online. As per the industry stats, in 2012 online shopping worth a whooping 278 billion U.S. dollars took place in U.S. alone, which is increasing year-on-year. Due to such trends of increasing demand of online sales, many brick and mortar business and new entrepreneurs are vying the online space to offer their products and services. To cater this demand, there has been a consistent rise with many new ecommerce websites emerging with unique set of offerings and business models. Now, with emergence of so many online stores, the competition is tough and only getting more tougher as every store owner is trying its best to position its store better than its competitor. (Also Read: Emerging Ecommerce Trends to Watch) One of such positioning is centered around consumer experience and how consumer feels which he visits an online place, as this is an important aspect in the overall decision making process. One of such  solutions is Magento and this post talks in length about how Magento can assist you in creating that right type of experience for your customers and thus helps attract and convert more customers to your online store.

Lets start by throwing some light on Magento, which is a popular ecommerce shopping cart solution that is launched in the year 2008 and is used to create professional & elegant online shopping stores world-wide. When we talk about creating unique customer experience, that largely means creating cutom stores that can portray the vision of the business and it is where Magento comes into picture. It is an open source ecommerce platform that provides excellent control over content, design and functionality so that you can craft a highly customized website for your online business. It is equipped with lots of advanced features and that is the sole reason which convinced so many entrepreneurs to opt for PSD to Magento conversion for their ecommerce requirements:

Powerful search and browsing capabilities

Customized landing pages

Product suggestion tools

Customer segmentation

Use of persistent cookie to provide persistent shopping experience

Targeted store promotion tools

Product return management

Multiple payment & shipping options

Multiple store management from single admin console

Mobile commerce

Loyalty program management through gift cards & store credits

Order management & tracking 

High performance through speed optimization & security 

Now a days, there are lot of options available for creation of ecommerce applications to cater to the need of businesses ranging from small size to ones handling thousand of products. Magento has emerged out as a full fledged end-to-end shopping solution that has everything required by a business of any scale, which make it a preferred choice among all the segments. You may hire a professional website development company in India or elsewhere and they would be able to assist you in your Magento development project.

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Selecting a right Wordpress Development Company

Online branding has become an indispensable option for any businesses which are present on web. Today every businesses is looking to position themselves and thus are sanctioning huge dollar budgets for their online marketing strategy implementation. With the changing eCommerce trends, the online marketing has come off from initial concentration to aspects like SEO, PPC etc.to advance concepts like remarketing and advanced web analytic's, even measuring customers online behavior. One of the important ingredient of online marketing and to convey organizations message, companies develop and maintain elegant blogs. Therefore, if you are eyeing for a long term innings in web space having a great blog would go a long wa in your online marketing efforts. When developing your online communication medium, it is important to ensure that an uncompromising and a world-class blog identity is established, the same requires selection of a right WordPress Development company as the foremost step.

Following below given steps to hire the most suitable developer for your job.

Understand your Goals & Requirements: It is about choosing a right partner that can align with your business requirements and vision and not vice-versa. Therefore, the first step in your quest for hiring a right company for your wordpress project, is to ascertain your business requirements, your expectations, deliverable's, time-line and budget. It is only when you know what you are searching for, that you'd actually

go forward for a successful and meaningful search for a right development company. This preparation could be in form of wire-frames describing project requirements, list of reference/ competitor sites, particular elements from different sites that you like, launch date for the application and the $$$ you are looking to put forward for the initial launch.

Shortlist Top Service Provides: After you have formulated the list of requirements and you are clear about your goals, now is the time go forward to shortlist some of the fine companies for your web development outsourcing requirements. Search on internet about major wordpress development companies and review their portfolios to prepare a tentative list of providers which you can use as a base to reach the best one.

Research your Shortlisted Service Providers: Once you have prepared the list of shortlisted service providers, now you need to dig in information about each service provider in depth. Check their portfolio in detail, see what are their quality levels and whether or no it matches your vision, check if they have done something similar to what you are after. Read about their clients, what type of reviews company has got over various review sites and if there are any complaints  Even in case of complaints, do not out rightly reject that company from your list, and especially if you like their work. See what is the nature of complaints, is it repeating time and again, is it the same person shouting everywhere and if they are genuine. Also, while checking their work you measure their websites on different parameters like UI/UX, W3C validation, compatibility with different browsers, responsiveness, loading speed etc. to further narrow down the list.

Talk to the Final Set of Shortlisted Companies: The companies that made out to this round should be contacted for a one-to-one session with their representative via telephonic or video conferencing means. During the conference calls, understand their approach for project development, their engagement models, what they have to say about industry standards, what type of Quality Assurance provisions they adopt, what are their payment terms and what type of information they need to provide a formal quotation. When you'll talk to different organizations, you'd learn more about what they have to say about your project and these interactions would eventually assist you to find the players whom you are comfortable interacting.  Several such meetings in which you discuss their proposed solutions, will help you to get to the right service provider for your corporate website development needs.

Bind it in a Legal Agreement: Now since you have decided on the strategic technology partner for your project, the next step would be to enter into a legal contract so as to ensure a smooth sailing during the development process. Whether you have chosen a wordpress development company in India or elsewhere, you need to have a legal obligation in place, that talks specifically about payment terms, milestones, confidentiality  ownership rights, copyright etc.

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Wordpress CMS: Bloggers Popular Choice

Wordpress is the most popular content management system used by bloggers, web designers and developers through out the world. Being an open source solution it available free of cost and can be downloaded at a single click from internet. As of today, Wordpress has pioneered the blogging space and has attained the apex position among the available blogging platforms. (Also read: Dare to Think Beyond WordPress). It is used by millions of bloggers to create stunning blogs and to update them regularly.

Undoubtedly wordpress is a perfect blogging tool which incorporates a powerful CMS. Wordpress began its journey as a customizable and easy to manage blogging platform, however with the constant additions of new features,WordPress has become widely popular and is now used for all types of different websites. With time CMS has transformed itself from a simple blogging platform and is now used extensively for corporate sites, forums, membership sites and even used for complicated eCommerce websites.

Here are key factors that make Wordpress CMS a preferred choice for blog development :

Easy of Installation & Maintenance 

The installation of Wordpress is very easy and can be performed simply by clicking on the WordPress link in your hosting providers control panel. Also, ease of operation on wordpress makes it self-serviceable platform and thus you would not need assistance of a wordpress development company for the maintenance and daily content updates.

Search Engine Friendly (SEO)

Wordpress CMS is fully SEO friendly as it is written with clean code and as per the latest industry standards. With so many SEO plugins available to manage important SEO components like Meta tags, title tag, keywords, description etc. makes search engine optimization task easier.

User Friendliness 

The best part of Wordpress CMS is it user-friendliness that makes it favorite among millions of users and more so for non-technical bloggers  trying to setup and run their businesses in a hassle free manner. Bloggers can easily add pages, edit content, manage photos & videos, create custom sidebars, manage plugins etc. and that too without the need of any technical knowledge.

Customization
Wordpress is an open-source solution and can be fully customized as per the requirements of an individual business domain, as each business is unique. You may hire an experienced wordpress development company and they can then craft the site as per your taste.

Automatic Updates
Wordpress is alive and keeps itself in-line with the changing environment, trends and technology updates. Even the installed plugins on your wordpress site gets new version releases and the same are updated automatically.

Scalability
Business experiences growth with time and as the business grows, so can the websites developed with wordpress can grow to meet the new demands. and challanges. The functionality, categories and the number of pages can be increased anytime, to cater to the requirements of growing business.

Designing Express is a professional organization for Wordpress development in India and offers best in class wordpress CMS customization solutions.

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Increasing Demand of PSD to WordPress Conversion Services

WordPress has been in business for years now and its amazing capabilities as a blogging platform and a content management system is widely known. The CMS brings gamut of features for your website and make site's management a cake walk, which was once considered a pain in neck, thus makes it a preferred choice among web developers. Wordpress dominates the market with a massive 54.5% share among content management systems and its popularity can be attributed to Wordpress's powerful and effective CMS.

It has been a very long journey for Wordpress from being one among the blogging platforms to become a market leader today. With the increasing popularity of Wordpress, the demand for PSD to Wordpress conversion has witnessed a multi-fold increase. Using PSD to WordPress/HTML conversion, the elegant designs can be converted into a functional Wordpress site using 100& hand-coded development and gives client a cost-effective development solution.

Benefits of PSD to WordPress Conversion:

Easily Manageable - The powerful CMS allows anyone, even with no or little technical knowledge, to manage their web pages easily using the administration console of the CMS. Even the templates and themes are easy to import, install and upgrade.

Full W3C compliance - Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important aspect for all business and  the sites having W3C complaint validation gain significant advantage from search engines. It indicates that your website has been created as per the World Wide Web (WWW) norms.

Individual post protection - This tool provides you with an ability of using password protection to individual posts and this characteristic facilitates hiding them from being public.

Cost Effectiveness - The cost of quality PSD to Wordpress conversion is low and hence very affordable. The wordpress, being an open source tool, is available to download free of cost and hence, the overall solution is highly cost effective for start-ups, small and mid-size businesses.

Social media integration - The compatibility across social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ etc. is provided. With social media profiles linked to your wordpress driven website, you can share your blogs with large audience and hence, increase traffic to your website.

Effective PSD to WordPress conversion requires great technical skills and it has to be done in the right way as the complete experience of online audience and ease of maintenance would depend upon, how well the conversion has been executed. Though, WordPress provides full control over the website via the admin console, the implementation of the software would ensure that the complete power of wordpress is harnessed.

As more and more businesses are opting to get online, the websites developed using wordpress are bound to increase. The businesses would have to ensure that they select right wordpress development company in India or elsewhere for their PSD to Wordpress conversion to kick-start their online venture. Designing Express is an experience organization for wordpress development in India and have delivered more than 250 projects to its clientele world-wide.

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Grow Your Business using Wordpress Content Management System

Each time a business strategies about designing their web identity, the first question that comes to their mind is the selection of a right content management system (CMS). Among the diverse range of CMS systems available to choose from,  WordPress would be a right solution for such businesses due to its proven benefits (Also Read: Wordpress is Getting Popular). It is one of the most popular free blogging system that facilitate a user friendly and yet, a powerful CMS. Easy installation, availability of great collection of themes, plethora of plugin support, community support, flexibility and scalability makes it an ideal option for businesses looking to expand beyond their physical stores. The importance of social media for businesses is well known and Wordpress understand this very well therefore, it provides the facility of sharing information across all major social media platforms. In this article we are going to provide important elements that should be implemented to extract full advantage of Wordpress for your business. 

Everyone like freshness: Content is an important aspect of any website and it is indispensable to keep the content fresh. WordPress comes with a user-friendly interface using which you can add new pages to your website, edit the existing ones and manage the navigation, all by yourself. Always remember, you need to give your customers a reason to keep coming back to your site and appealing content increases the probability of retaining and attracting online visitors.

Can't ignore social media: As per the recent internet research on marketing trends, 43% of people in the age-group 20-30 spend more than 10 hours a week on social media platforms. Marketers have to be present where their target audience is and therefore, social media has become a necessary platform to touch base and showcase your offerings.  The social media has covered a lot of ground and it is not easy to have presence everywhere however, major networks like having a FaceBook fan page, a Twitter profile, a Linkedin profile, a Pinterest profile is a must. You might have chosen an exceptional wordpress development company in India or elsewhere however, choosing a strategic marketing partner is as important.  Such networks can help you spread information among your prospective clients and an opportunity of keeping your content fresh.

Don't undermine the importance of a Blog: Blogs have been used since the inception of internet and still the best tool for generating traffic for a website. It allows you to share your business vision, your domain knowledge, product information and important announcements with your customers and prospects. For instance, if you are a realtor and maintains a real estate web design site you can share your specific services and USP in the geographical area of operation. Also, you can address the changing real estate trends in your local market and your views to government policy changes in real estate sector on your official blog.

Blogging is not a kids play, take it seriously: Writing is an art as well as science therefore, it has to be taken carefully. In  order to get it right, you can read the latest happenings, review what others have to say about topics of your interest and  consistently do guest postings on high-traffic blogs as it brings quality audience back to your blog. The success factor would definitely depend upon the topics that you choose to write as it should be of interest to audience you are targeting and the quality of writing, as that's something on which the complete game revolves.

Customization would add up to the advantage: You as a business, has knowledge about your industry which only you can bring forward while developing your website. Therefore, when you chose a company for your wordpress development in India share your industry experience, the best practices etc. with your developer. This would go a long way in ensuring that right type of customer experience is created on your website which would directly correspond to the behavior of the online visitor searching information about your industry domain. A business that successfully demonstrates its leadership and expertise in a particular domain, is bound to receive high quality leads.

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Why Application Development Projects go over Budget and Timeline?

If we talk in terms of stats, at least 82% projects go over budget and timeline. Researches have shown that there are so many reasons a project can have a cost overrun, understanding of which can go a long way for you to keep your project on track.


Incomplete or ill defined Project Scope & Planning
Project scope clearly lays down the inclusions and exclusions on the forefront even before a single line of code is written. It is a part of project planning which assists you in transferring your project ideas and vision to your web development company. It is defined keeping in minds your target audience, consumer experience, application's usability, quantitative measures & benchmarks, revenue generation model, etc. These aspects not only assist you in defining your project scope to perfection but would help your service provider to formulate a right execution strategy incorporating technical expertise requirements, the methodology, selection of right technical framework, etc.


Improper scope definition is the major factor affecting costs in long term and hence, the more the clarity is achieved during scope definition, less is the probability of surprises later on.


Wrong choice of the Development Company
The skill set of those assigned to deliver the project team is another important decision which can affect the overall budget and completion time. Even within a company if wrong members are picked who lack required expertise, it will either take them longer to perform a particular module of the project or the project manager will spend its time monitoring the unmatched talent.

When shopping around for a web design company in India or else where, look for a company that has similar expertise and experience of your domain of interest. Do your research and spend time interviewing providers as a good service provider will ask the right questions, will take interest in understanding your business model, will bring his experience to provide consultation and will not agree to everything you ask.

Inexperience Project Manager

Inexperience of the project management lead mean, any aspect of project management can get a hit anytime thereby increasing ambiguity of the budget and time-lines. Project management is both science and art whereby, both people skills and technical skills are indispensable aspects of an effective management, which comes with experience of being in leadership roles of complex project development cycles. A good project manager plans each aspect of the project in advance, senses deviation from planned path, manages team conflicts, manages project scope and maintains seamless communication with the client ensuring they are in-line with the progress.


Poor Communication

Seamless communication is absolutely vital to the success of any project. The communication channels between the development team and the client, and also the intra organization communication must be clearly defined. Researches have proved that the inability of proper communication by any of the project agents (client, manager or developers) can lead to tasks not being carried out as expected and thereby results in time delays and budget overruns during correction phase.

Poor Risk Management

Risk management is also a part of project planning and often the most overlooked one. In project planning where there is no or poor emphasis to identify, assess, plan and implement risk procedures,the consequences could be damaging. Effective project risk management provides early warning signs on major risks, preempting risks, and increases the chances of controlling them thereby, meeting the targeted budget and time-line

Designing Express offers a full range of services for web development and iPhone app development in India. For such interesting posts and articles do visit The Official Blog of Designing Express.

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