WordPress Themes – My Own Designs

Several reasons to consider using WordPress for business

Posted on January 11, 2020 by rosseankofoot

Over 35 per cent of all websites on the Internet use the WordPress CMS. This includes the website you are currently on. Although you are presently viewing the blog section, you may take a look at the front page, which is a one-page website featuring my services. Websites powered by WordPress offer much more options and possibilities than we have heard about. Below are the top reasons why you should consider using this particular content management system for business.

Before I outline the main reasons why you should be using WordPress and what are its benefits for business owners, let us define what it is in essence. As a dynamic content management system, WordPress is widely used across the globe for the creation of professional, appealing to the eye and modern blogs and websites. The software is powering more than 75 million websites and its popularity is growing at an ever increasing pace. So allow me list the main reasons behind the growth in popularity of this particular CMS.

SEO friendliness

Because of the ease with which search engines can crawl websites powered by WordPress, they actually prefer them.
Ease of use
The platform is without a doubt easy to learn, friendly to novice users and intuitive. Even if you have no prior experience using WordPress, you can literally dive into it in a matter of minutes.

An outstanding support

The WordPress community is simply unbeatable as a resource and destination where you can acquire answers and solutions for all the issues you might be having with the software.

Scalable

For the reason that WordPress has a vast pool of themes and plugins, it isn’t difficult to develop a website, meeting any and all of the exact specifications of your business.

Mature and stable

Many people wrongly assume that having a WordPress website is unprofessional and only unexperienced individuals use it. In fact, powerhouses like CBS New York, CNN, Sony, Coca-Cola France and eBay rely on the CMS as their system of choice for running their websites.

Interactive

The tens of thousands of available plugins and themes allow you to crease a long-lasting and more connected business relationship with your clients through the use of testimonials, surveys, newsletter signups and share buttons.

Business awareness

WordPress is easily integrated with PayPal and makes it very easy to accept donations or payments on a website of your choice without paying any fees in advance.

Solutions for Ecommerce

A pool of Ecommerce solutions transform WordPress into the Ecommerce solution of your choice if you strive to convert your website into a digital store where you can sell a large range of products and services. The process is streamlined and made easy through popular plugins like WP eCommerce, WooCommerce and Shopp. They make the process of earning money online easier.

Responsive and mobile-ready themes

WordPress easily determines whether an individual is accessing your website via a mobile device or a web browser and configures the content accordingly. This eliminates the need to create a second website for small screen devices.
Also, there is a sea of available responsive themes, both free and paid, that can instantly transform the content of your website and make it look equally well on a wide range of devices using various screen widths.
Having said all this, WordPress is without a doubt an important consideration for your business website. The CMS can ensure the success of your business and transform your business venture into a successful online enterprise.…

Create a WordPress Theme from Scratch with Underscores

Posted on December 23, 2019 by rosseankofoot

If you are a WordPress enthusiast and wish to learn how to make a WordPress theme from scratch and what are the steps to create such a theme, you may wish to start with one of the available starter themes. This will undoubtedly save you a lot of time and as the folks behind Underscores claim, you will have a head start of approximately 1000 hours if you decide to use their starter theme as a base for yours.
While there may already be several online tutorials on

I urge you to take a look at the one by Web Courses Bangkok. It is a detailed course on creating a simple portfolio theme with _s, consisting of 14 articles that result in the development of a WordPress theme ready to be added to the WordPress.org repository.

While the design of the theme is theirs, I was actively involved in the creation of the theme itself, which also means that should you have any questions about the course, you can ask about it in the comments section below or contact Web Courses Bangkok directly.

If you have never worked with Underscores before, this is your chance to learn how to create your own theme. If you are already familiar with it, you can compare my process of developing a WP theme with yours.

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WordPress Migration

Posted on November 2, 2019February 26, 2022 by rosseankofoot

If you own or maintain a WordPress website, there is a very high probability that you have already considered looking for a new hosting company on more than one occasion. This is the reason we put together this tutorial for migrating a WordPress website.

Perhaps you are fed up with the slow performance of your website, failing database connections or less than adequate customer support.

Many hosting companies just fail to put up the necessary infrastructure that could tolerate host failures. They are forced to run at their peak capacity and cannot deal with a single host failure. This in turn is a blatant disregard of the best practices.

Before WordPress migration

Prior to migrating a site, you need to ask yourself a few questions:

Are your present and future hosts running the same web server? – If both webhosting companies run an Apache server, you shouldn’t expect complications. If they do not, however, and you are migrating from an Apache to Nginx server, for example, you may need to make certain configurations to ensure your website runs smoothly on the next server.
Are your current and destination hosts running different PHP versions? The difference between PHP 5.3.2 and PHP 5.2.3 could have a substantial impact on WordPress or on some of the plugins the CMS uses.
Are both hosts running different MySQL versions? Ensure your new host runs MySQL 5.0 or a more recent version. Anything below 5.0 won’t cover the minimum requirements for a successful WordPress migration.

Moving the content

After you have successfully uploaded the wp-content directory, containing the static files of your site, to the new host, you can use the import/export feature found in the Tools menu of your WP dashboards to restore the site’s content.

This is a straightforward task that doesn’t require from you to directly interact with the site’s database.

This is great for a situation in which you already have a WordPress installation on your new host. Because you already have a new and functional WordPress site, you don’t have to overwrite the wp-config.php file in the main directory of your installation. Doing so will break the connection with the database.

This is the simplest method for exporting all types of data from a WordPress site, including pages and posts, comments, custom post types, categories, custom fields, custom taxonomies, tags, users and theme attributes. Be cautious, however, that this method is not the same as restoring a full database backup. While it is true that you may get all your content up and running on the new hosting, you could leave something behind.

Working with the database

As WordPress requires MySQL, it is assumed safe to claim that more than 99% of all WP websites use it, and all hosting companies will provide you with the number of MySQL database you require for a certain price.

phpMyAdmin is the tool which allows you to interact with a WordPress database. This application for managing MySQL databases makes it simple and easy to work with a database through a browser. Exporting the WordPress database with phpMyAdmin is a straightforward task, a part of the migration process, and the web provides countless tutorials on how to do it.

Modifying the wp-config.php file when necessary

After you transfer the static files of your site from your old to your new hosting via FTP, you have to ensure that the database connection is established properly.

If in doubt, examine, and when necessary, update the hostname, the database name, the user and the password credentials with those provided to you by your new host.

A word of warning: If you replace your existing wp-config.php file with the one from your old host, you will break the connection with your new database and render WordPress useless.

Housekeeping procedures

After the migration is successful, it would be great to delete the parts of your old WP installation you no …

Web Design Trends to Expect

Posted on August 9, 2019May 27, 2020 by rosseankofoot

With each passing year web design is growing at an ever faster rate and with each passing day there are more and more awesome things happening. It would not be difficult to guess that new and exciting developments are just around the corner in 2015.

Although we have already seen a lot of trends in 2014, and these are likely to continue in 2015 too, it is time to outline the most likely trends to emerge in 2015.

While many people have their thoughts still focused on the year 2014, some are eager to learn what web design trends are likely to dominate in the year 2015.

Lengthier designs

The majority of new website designs are lengthier today when scrolling down the page than they used to be in past years. As the popularity of mobile devices increases, the need for scrolling, instead of linking, as a way to present content on a page, becomes more evident. This is especially true for homepages.

Users find it easier to scroll down a page instead of clinking to find additional information.

The long scrolling trend is evident not only on homepages though. While sites with long scrolling designs have already won popularity, scrolling has a lot of benefits and is not limited to homepages. Product and about pages also use it as a way to display a range of content in an elegant way.

The iPhone 6 page of Apple, for example, demonstrated the trend towards long scrolling pages outside of its homepage. The main iPhone 6 page has been designed as a long scrolling layout and showcases all of the features and specifications of a product.

Additionally, the site employs a slick animation effect to ensure a visually enhanced scrolling experience.

Interaction and storytelling

Although producing great content is very important for your website, it is a big plus to be able to tell a story. In the year 2015, web design will most likely emphasize on storytelling.

Take for example the website of Space Needle. It nicely conveys the facts around the Space Needle through storytelling and the custom-made design supporting it. What is more is that it is perfectly in line with the aforementioned trend for long scrolling.

The website Space Needle is also an example of another 2015 trend – interaction. The designs of websites are becoming animated and more interactive, with the aim to present particular content in a more appealing and unique way.

The removal of large background images from the header

The past few years have seen the use of large images as header backgrounds with text on top. This was the first element of a website presented to visitors. It quickly became clear that in order to stand out from the crowd you had to do the opposite.
Some websites have decided to do just that with their designs and preserve the large headers but remove background images. However, not following this trend wasn’t the only option for such a consideration. The owners of such sites also tried to optimize speed and performance.
The site of The New Wave Company is a clear indication for this. Its large header and page-centered typography welcome its visitors. What the design seems to “lack” is a large image in the background behind the heading.

All this is done with a taste and doesn’t follow the design of other websites that use large images for header backgrounds.

Simplicity and removal of unessential design elements

One of the pillars of web design is that a design is only complete when all unnecessary and unessential elements have been disposed of. As websites are looking for a way to simplify their designs, I trust we will be observing more websites following this trend by abandoning non-essential design elements.
The aforementioned website of The New Wave Company did exactly that by deciding not to have a huge header background image.

Centered, fixed-width

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