All posts by Adam Prattler

How to Choose a CMS

SEO

Tips to Help You Find a Great Content Management System

Photo by Nektarios Sylligardakis / Flickr

If you’re in the market for a new content management system – aka CMS – you’re probably confused by all the options available. To help you out, we’re going to give you a short checklist of things you want to do before you make your decision. As a bonus, we’re going to give you a list of the three most commonly used CMS software online.

How to Choose a CMS

Here’s a simple list of the things you want to consider before you make a decision about what CMS to use.

  • Technical Knowledge – How technical you are when it comes to coding will have an effect on which choice you make. For example, if you’re good at coding, Drupal or Joomla may be a better choice to give you more options. On the other hand, if you want something simple, you should go with something like WordPress that doesn’t require as many skills to install or use.

  • Themes / Plugins – Each CMS will call these elements something slightly different, but it comes down to how your website is going to look and functionality. You want to choose a CMS that has a lot of options but at the same time worries about security and making sure code is safe for others to use on their website. Most major CMS platforms are going to have a lot of choices available.

Top Three Current CMS Choices

Here’s a look at three of the major CMS choices you can make.

  • Drupal – Based on PHP, Drupal has been around for a while now. Installing this CMS has gotten easier over the years, but you still have to do a lot of setup and install a lot of modules in order to get started with anything other than a basic blog website.

  • WordPress – The most popular CMS currently is WordPress. Downloaded and used by millions of people this is super easy software to install and use. All of the great themes and plugins for the CMS make it easy to have it do whatever you want.

  • Joomla – Based off of early Drupal code, Joomla has sprouted into it’s own tool. This is not easy to use, but it allows you to customize almost everything. This can be a bit overwhelming if you’re new to content management systems.

As you can see, a lot goes into which CMS you should choose. The fact that there are so many choices out there doesn’t make it any easier. Just remember that if you stick with one of the major three, you’re going to have a larger community of other users who can help answer your questions and more.

Bio

Sarah Jessica has been shopping for engagement rings for a while, trying to find the perfect one. Shopping online has helped a lot, allowing her to look at a lot of different samples.

Is Web Page Load Speed Really Important?

Hosting, Organic SEO, SEO, SEO tools, ,

Yes! Tips and Advice to Make Your Website Screamingly Fast.

Photo by CircaSassy / Flickr

The amount of time it takes for your website to appear is very important for quite a few different reasons. We’re going to explore those below, but before we begin, it’s important for you to know the current page load speed for your homepage at least. To do this, you can use Google’s Pagespeed analysis online. Use the free tool to see how well you stack up against your three major competitors. Not liking the results? Keep reading.

Why Web Page Load Speed is Crucial

First of all, you have to think about your human visitors. Whether they’re using a mobile device or desktop computer, they expect your website to load quickly. If it doesn’t, they’ll click away and find another one. Additionally, Google and the other search engines are using page load speed as one of many factors to determine whether or not to rank a web page and where to rank it in their index.

Tips to Improve Page Load Speed

Here are some easy things you can do to decrease the amount of time it takes for your pages to load.

  • Follow the Advice – If you followed the instructions at the beginning of this article, you should know how long it takes for your web pages to load on average. You should have noticed in the tool that Google gives you quite a few suggestions on how to improve your speeds. This is the very first place you should start to look for ways to get your website loading quickly.

  • Strip it Down – If something is not absolutely necessary on your website, get rid of it. Too many websites try to do everything for everybody. This is a mistake – even for mega sites like Facebook. Instead, pick one or a handful of things and do them all really, really well. Going deep rather than wide is a wise strategy in the Information Age. When you do this, you’ll find that you don’t really need all those bells and whistles that can slow down your website.

The speed of your website is very important to people and to Google’s robots. This is why you should make it a priority for all of your web properties. The good news is that once you do the work, you can reap the benefits for a long time to come. If you have any other specific tips for decreasing the amount of time it takes to load a web page, leave a comment and share your wisdom below. (And take a moment to let us know what you think about the time it takes for this website to load. Be honest, please!)

Author Bio:-

Sheila Kurdinger is a fan of Festool brand tools. She’s even bought them as gifts for her family and friends who aren’t so mechanically inclined. When not reclining in her chair in the living room, she likes to read about infographics online.

Using CloudFlare to Speed Up Your Site

SEO

CloudFlare Can Make Your Site Faster – and More Secure!

Photo by Garrett Heath / Flickr

Content Distribution Networks – CDN – technology has come a long way over the years. In 2013, CloudFlare is leading the way with a new generation CDN that is secure, seamless and very easy to install and get going. Compare this with first generation CDN networks that were cobbled together. Keep reading if you want to learn how to use CloudFlare to make your website run faster while at the same time protecting it against spammers and other malicious attacks.

How CloudFlare Makes Your Website Safer

As with other features on the CloudFlare service, you get a lot of control over the various security settings for your website. You can set using a preset option – think low, medium or high security – or you can go in and turn knobs and dials individually until you come up with what works best for you.

The dashboard allows you to see all the bad traffic you have blocked – as well as a simple breakdown of search engine crawlers that have visited your website. You’re going to be amazed when you see how many attacks happen against your website on a daily basis. If you get any amount of traffic, a certain percentage is going to be spammers or malicious attacks.

How CloudFlare Makes Your Website Faster

If you sign-up for the free service only, you’re going to receive a CDN (that’s easy to setup) for all your static content resources. Additionally, you’ll get access to Rocket Loader, which offers synchronous loading of JavaScript resources and Auto Minify to make your file sizes smaller. Pro and Business class accounts get other features like automatic image optimization on the fly. Yes, you heard that right. All of these can dramatically decrease the page load times for your website.

Is CloudFlare Right For You?

Easy answer? Probably. Even if you sign-up for the free service to test it out, within a couple days you should be able to notice a difference. There’s a very good chance that you’re going to at least see a small improvement. On the other end of the spectrum, you may be amazed at how much faster your website runs – while being more secure as well. Sign-up today and see for yourself the different CloudFlare can make.

If you already have experience with using CloudFlare services, leave a comment below and share your experience with the rest of us. This next generation CDN is light years ahead of the competition. Finally, it’s easy to make your website safer and faster at the same time without a lot of work. The best news is that there’s a good chance they’re going to be improving the service in the years ahead, making it even better.

Author Bio:-

Jessica Sampson has been looking for real estate in Reno NV online in her spare time. She’s thinking of moving there someday. For now, she’s content where she is living. She loves apples and orangutans.