Website Managers

Posts Tagged ‘blog hosting’

During the past few weeks my blog and other sites had been painfully slow. The page loading time was in excess of 15 seconds. When in the WordPress dashboard, I would click a button to update a setting and go do something else for 2 minutes while the page loaded.

As a marketer, we are told that we have 7 seconds to grab the attention of visitors. If the page takes longer than that to load, there is a good chance they will go someplace else.

The slow loading became so frustrating that I called our web host, Pagematic. Since some of the sites I run are on a Virtual Private Server (VPS), things that others do on that server can affect the performance of my websites. For instance, if someone ran intensive or poorly written scripts on their VPS, the entire srever can slow down. In this instance, Pagematic located the sites that were running scripts which are not allowed on the server and shut them down. Read the rest of this entry »

While there are many free WordPress themes from which to choose for your own blog, you may not find one that exactly suits your needs. If that describes you, then learning how to design your own theme may be what you are looking for.

Tessa Blakeley Silver wrote an instructional manual named WordPress Theme Design. It is intended to be a complete guide to creating professional WordPress themes, with practical step-by-step instructions for theme design.

Included are development tools for setting up your WordPress sandbox, design tips and suggestions, setting up the template structure for your theme, coding markup, tips on testing, debugging and taking it live, reviewing the best practices.

Shriharsha Bhat of Packt Publishing said, “This book walks through clear, step-by-step instructions to build a custom theme for the WordPress open-source blog engine. The author provides design tips and suggestions and covers setting up the WordPress sandbox, and reviews the best practices from setting up the theme’s template structure, through coding markup, testing, and debugging, to taking it live.”

“The last three chapters cover additional tips, tricks, and various cookbook recipes for adding popular site enhancements to WordPress theme designs using 3rd-party plugins as well as creating API hooks to add custom plugins.”

Learn more about WordPress Theme Design by visiting Amazon.com.

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Jim Hutchinson
Website Managers, LLC
Discount WordPress Blog Hosting