How to Create a Custom Three Part Form Using Gravity Forms

In this post, we’re going to take a look at how you can use Gravity Forms to accept author applications for your news site.

If you are running a news site using a theme like DW Focus, there’s a good chance that you rely on contributions from other authors to maintain a decent volume of content. Furthermore, if you pay for content submissions there is also a good chance you’re inundated with email applications from potential authors.

Wouldn’t it be easier if we created a form that allows a potential author to apply for a writing position by submitting their personal contact details and answering a few specific questions. All of the applications could be emailed to the appropriate person and stored in the database for review.

I think you’ll be surprised just how easy the process of creating a simple three-part form can be. It’s something that can be accomplished even if you’re using the most basic version of Gravity Forms. Continue

How to Use Caching to Increase the Speed of Your WordPress Website

When someone visits your website, you have mere seconds to grab their attention and keep them engaged in what your site has to offer. The faster your website loads when visitor arrives, the better. If your overall site performance is low however, you risk alienating a portion of the traffic your site receives.

Your WordPress website shuttles lots of information between many different computers, near and far, to deliver content to your readers. Would you like to know a great way to quicken the retrieval time of your content, increase your site’s overall speed and performance, and even lessen the traffic that flows around the internet on a consistent basis?

If so, you are in the right place. The fastest, most efficient way to optimize your WordPress website is through a concept called caching,  and in this article we will explain how you can make use of this to improve the speed of your website. Continue

How to Set Up a RSS to Email Campaign for a WordPress Blog

Do you have an email mailing list working alongside your blog? If not then you definitely should think about setting one up. But, how do you going about doing so?

Thankfully there are plenty of options available when you are ready to start your email list or newsletter. You can compose the email content yourself, hire writers to do so, or maybe you can’t even think about starting an email campaign because your daily to-do list just won’t handle another task to accomplish.

If that last scenario sounds like something you can relate to, then this post will show you how you can start emailing out a list of your most recent blog posts to your subscriber mailing list, at regular intervals – all on autopilot.

By the end of this article, you will know how to set up an RSS to email campaign for your WordPress blog. This post will teach you how to use the RSS feed from your blog to create email campaigns, helping you to see why you can’t afford not to be working with an RSS-email combination.

Let’s begin by talking about why starting an email newsletter for your WordPress blog is such a great idea.
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How to install WordPress locally on Your Computer

Building WordPress themes and plugins locally is a huge time saver. Creating a local development environment is nothing complicated. As you probably already know, it is simply a web server running on your computer, as opposed to a remote one, which is usually a hosting plan you purchased.

Coding WordPress themes and plugins entails a lot of back and forth testing, as well as browser refreshing. Since there are no latency issues to deal with on a local server environment, you work through this process a lot faster than on a live server, where you have to wait for your network connection.

Moreover by developing on a local server, you give yourself ample room for mistakes. That is, you can make as many mistakes as possible and cause no harm whatsoever. This is different with a live environment since it typically hosts other websites and some mistakes may be unforgiving – especially those that may affect the security of the live server.

Furthermore, if you want to test out any themes or plugins, before adding them to your live website, having a local installation of WordPress to experiment on has its obvious benefits.

If you like the sound of setting up your own local server environment to install WordPress on your computer, then this article will highlight some of the best options. You will also find a walk through guide to setting this up with my service of choice.

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Essential Plugins and Themes for Creating a WordPress Website That Isn’t a Blog

It might seem strange to use WordPress to create a traditional type of website, one which has a fixed home page and doesn’t include a blog. However, if you are already familiar with WordPress, or you want to make use of the countless themes and plugins available for the software when creating a traditional non-blog website, we totally understand why you would want to use WordPress for this purpose.

Being able to tap into the shared knowledge of the large community of WordPress users and its burgeoning ecosystem is another benefit of using this software that can’t be overlooked.

So in today’s post we are going to look at some useful plugins and themes you can install on your brochureware or non-blog website, which will make it easier to manage, add some essential features, and generally look and work better. Continue