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Two Favorite Free WordPress Photo Gallery Plugins (ones that you may not be aware of)

May 1, 2012 by Marc 1 Comment

For many years I used NextGen to create, manage and display photo galleries in WordPress. It was and is a very good gallery plugin. But then WordPress’ native image tools became much much better following the version 3.1 and subsequent updates. And I like being able keep all the images together in WordPress’ native media manager and use just one media library system. It also makes it easier to maintain optimal image SEO across all of a website.

For that reason I use NextGen much less these days and instead reach for either Shiba Gallery or Gallery To Slideshow. Now a little about each.

Shiba Gallery:

“The Shiba Gallery Plugin allows you to display a variety of javascript galleries within your WordPress blog. All you need to do is specify the type of gallery you want in your regular WordPress gallery shortcode.

The Shiba Gallery is very flexible and can render post, page, and gallery objects, in addition to image attachments.”

You gotta love Shiba Gallery’s flexibility, plus the huge library of included javascript galleries, particularly the ease of use of noobslide (a favorite), and that is can present even pages and posts in a slider. All within the native WordPress media manager. In using this plugin over the last almost two years, I have yet to be presented any conflicts caused by Shiba Gallery. It is a very tight well crafted gallery plugin. I wish I was in the WordPress plugin repository, but it is not. So you don’t see it all over the WordPress website universe, which can be good if you want to make your galleries look a little unique.

Gallery to Slideshow:

“Gallery to Slideshow converts the built-in gallery into a simple and responsive slideshow. It uses the FlexSlider jQuery image slider, and requires zero configuration from the user.”

For 2012 I am trying to make all my websites fully responsive to the device and display used by the visitor. With the huge growth of all types and sizes of mobile devices, and mobile users increased likelihood of purchasing, and Google’s advice to use only one domain (no mobile domains or subdomains) I believe responsive design is the best way to go! So the relatively new Gallery to Slideshow is getting a lot of use on the sites I am creating for photographers and others. It is simple and easy to use. And presents a good-looking fully functional gallery for Windows, Mac, Android or iOS visitors regardless of the browser and display size.

Although Shiba has many great and attractive features and is very reliable, the growth of mobile and the related marketing advantages has made Gallery to Slideshow my current “reach for first” WordPress gallery plugin. And I hope that Shiba will someday add responsive css.

Below are a couple of quick screen shots from the same site/page using Gallery to Slideshow, one with the browser at about 1140px width, and one at less at 400px width. You are welcome to visit the webpage gallery yourself and test it on different devices. If you have any display or sizing comments or other favorite responsive image gallery plugins, please let me know in the comments.

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, Photography, Tools and Tips, WordPress Tagged With: blogsites, galleries, marketing, photography, responsive design, search engine optimization, WordPress

WordPress Apps for Smartphones and Tablets Allow for Easy Website/Blog Posting and Management

April 22, 2012 by Marc 2 Comments

For us here in the northern hemisphere, it’s Spring and travel and vacation time will be increasing. And the time spent on your website for business or fun will be more difficult to manage.

Fortunately if your site or blog is based on the WordPress CMS there is help. WordPress provides apps for your mobile device that provides an easy to use interface and allows you to add content and images from your phone/tablet. And to more easily manage other aspects of your website and blog.

So you can put up information as easy as can be. It can be your latest vacation photos, a destination wedding images or events related to your company or products/service. Items for sale in your WordPress based shopping cart. Or even an open house.

Here are links for more information and to download the WordPress mobile device apps.

Apple iPnones and iPads – http://ios.wordpress.org/
Android smartphones and tablets – http://android.wordpress.org/
Windows phones – http://windowsphone.wordpress.org/
Blackberry smartphones and tablets – http://blackberry.wordpress.org/
Nokia spartphones – http://nokia.wordpress.org/
HP (WebOS) smartphones and tablets – http://webos.wordpress.org/

It is advantages like this which are just part of the reason that all sites we create use WordPress. WordPress websites provide the best, affordable internet marketing tools for small business.

Filed Under: Blogs, Internet Marketing, Social Media, Websites, WordPress Tagged With: Android, Apple, Blackberry, iOS, Nokia, smartphones, tablets, WebOS, Windows phones

Apple Flashback Virus Removal Tool

April 15, 2012 by Marc Leave a Comment

In the last day Apple has released effective removal tools for the Flashback trojan virus. The Flashback removal tool is available in a system update version as well as a stand alone version for systems without Java installed. The tool is not the easiest link to find on the Apple website. This is just a short post to help other OS X Lion users find the tool.

From Apple’s website -

Link for Flashback removal system update information – http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5244

Apple has released software updates for systems running OS X Lion and Mac OS X v10.6 that will update Java to fix the security flaw, and remove the Flashback malware if it is present. …

By default, your Mac automatically checks for software updates every week, but you can change that setting in Software Update preferences. You can run Software Update at any time to manually check for the latest updates.

Link for Flashback removal standalone for systems without Java installed – http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1517

This Flashback malware removal tool removes the most common variants of the Flashback malware.

If the Flashback malware is found, a dialog will be presented notifying the user that malware was removed.

Filed Under: News, Tools and Tips Tagged With: Apple, Flashback, OS X Lion, virus

You’re going to love WordPress 3.3′s new media uploader

December 9, 2011 by Marc Leave a Comment

WordPress 3.3 should be released in a very few days. It is a great version and I reccomend upgrading to it. I have been using the beta releases of WordPress 3.3 for a few weeks now and have found it almost trouble-free. The attention to detail of the WordPress team is better than ever.

The best new feature is the HTML5 media uploader which allows multiple image uploading from almost any type of device; desktops, laptops, tablets (including iPads) and smartphones (including iPhones).

Here is what the WordPress team has to say about the new media uploader features:

File Type Detection

We’ve streamlined things! Instead of needing to click on a specific upload icon based on your file type, now there’s just one. Once your file is uploaded, the appropriate fields will be displayed for entering information based on the file type.

Drag-and-Drop Media Uploader

Adding photos or other files to posts and pages just got easier. Drag files from your desktop and drop them into the uploader. Add one file at a time, or many at once.

More File Formats

We’ve added the rar and 7z file formats to the list of allowed file types in the uploader.

In my judgement what really makes it a major improvement for many of my clients, particularly photographers, is the Drag-and-Drop Media Uploader. It is major improvement to WordPress making it easy and reliable to upload multiple images at a time and works in all types of devices, even iPads! While it looks like some older uploaders that use Flash or Java the new WordPress uploader is a creation of HTML5. Rather than try to describe how it works, let me show you.

This makes it even easier to add images to WordPress galleries than Flash sites like Bludomain.

Filed Under: BluDomain, Tools and Tips, WordPress Tagged With: BluDomain, Facebook, Internet Marketing, photography, web/blogsites, WordPress

An easy way to increase your WordPress site’s speed and potentially your site’s Google rank. Smushit for WP!

November 30, 2011 by Marc Leave a Comment

For the almost two years now Google has used site speed as a factor in your site’s search results position.

If you want to know more about that here are some links:

An informational post from Matt Cutts explaining Google’s rationale for using site speed as a factor.
A detailed article from Google Webmastercentral on using site speed in search ranking.
More from Search Engine Land on site speed as a search ranking factor.

But most important is just this, install Smushit on your WordPress site. It is easy with the WP Smushit Plugin from the free WordPress repository. WP Smushit should be part of every WP site that uses photos and images. Using Yahoo’s service, it lossless-ly reduces the size of images files making your site load faster by;

optimizing JPEG compression
converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs
stripping the un-used colours from indexed images

It does this to both your existing images and new images you upload. Making the file size of images smaller causes your site to load faster, improving visitor experience and potentially increasing your Google search ranking.

After you install the plugin, go to your media library and have it smush all the images already there, which, depending on how many you have, can take some time. After the initial smushing, it will perform the optimization for you automatically upon each upload.

Getting on the first page of search results is often the result of many small differences and improvements. WP Smushit is an easy way to gain a helpful improvement.

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, Search Engines, SEO, Tools and Tips, WordPress Tagged With: Internet Marketing, search engine optimization, search marketing, search optimization, WordPress

IBM estimates 15% of site visits to retail sites in November are from smartphones and tablets

November 28, 2011 by Marc Leave a Comment

I mentioned this earlier as part of a long post, but it is very worthy of standing alone. IBM Coremetrics estimates that 15% of consumer retail site visits are using mobile devices in November 2011. This is a very recent, November 4th 2011, article and includes a trending graph showing the amazing growth of retail visits from mobile devices.

Please use the link above to read the entire, very worthwhile, article. But if you are rushed here are a couple of its nuggets:

Online Shopping Growth: Total online sales in November will experience impressive growth of 12-15 percent over the same period in 2010.
Mobile Traffic and Sales: Record numbers of consumers will shift their shopping from the PC to their mobile device this holiday season. In October nearly 11 percent of people used a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site, up from 4.2 percent in October 2010. Additionally, mobile sales continue to increase, reaching a high of 9.6 percent in October 2011, up from 3.4 percent in October 2010.

ps – Keep in mind that a major share of these visitors do not have Flash enabled smartphones and tablets..

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, News Tagged With: Flash, Internet Marketing, Websites

5 Great Custom Google Analytics Reports for your website – FREE

July 28, 2011 by Marc

My Dad often said “what gets measured gets done”. And these five custom reports seem to “channel” that wisdom helping you understand your website traffic and set and meet goals. All particularly important if you are an online marketer or derive other revenue from your website. And the standard Google Analytics reports often don’t provide some of the data detail you need.

I will be brief, just do the following now. Get the details, why these are most useful, how to use the reports and install the reports in your Google Analytics account by going to this Search Engine Watch article by Greg Habermann “My Top 5 Most Used Custom Reports in Google Analytics“.

These are excellent well crafted reports for analyzing your site traffic and making well-reasoned changes to your site to increase your results and meet your goal.

This is one of my favorite articles of this month and if you have any questions please send me an email or leave a comment.

Filed Under: Business Planning, Internet Marketing, Tools and Tips Tagged With: Google, Google Analytics, Internet Marketing, search marketing, website marketing

Measuring the SEO of your site, your competitors’ sites and the people trying to sell you SEO services

January 30, 2011 by Marc Leave a Comment

There are a lot advantages to having a website with strong, positive, active SEO properties and structure. The search marketing opportunities from excellent SEO may dramatically increase your business income and significantly reduce expenses.

Many website owners will pursue trying to improve their site’s SEO but have little in the way of methods to measure progress or change. Before you spend a lot of time and/or money on SEO it is very helpful to have “baselines” to measure your own site and how it “stacks-up” against your competition. Also before you buy any SEO services I suggest measuring the site of the SEO company. Doesn’t it seem reasonable that if they are selling the service shouldn’t their site(s) demonstrate some of their SEO ability?

So how to measure a website’s SEO? There are a lot of tools, but there are two I use everyday. These provide a quick snapshot of a site’s SEO potential and can be refreshed to show the results of any changes that you make. This means you get an idea of your progress without having to wait possibly weeks for Google’s index to reflect your changes.

They are:

the Website Grader website and,
Vladimir Prelovac’s SEO Doctor add-on for Firefox (you will need to use Firefox)

Both of these tools will provide you a numeric percentage type score and some summary evaluations of important site structure, elements and assets. It is important to understand that these tools cannot measure the outcome of your SEO efforts. (After all you can have great SEO but have it poorly targeted to your potential market. ) But even if you have the best content it will likely fail in the search engine results against your competitors if your site does not score well.

And what is a good score? Glad you asked. In a competitive market I think you need to be above 95 (or work towards) in the SEO Doctor and above 90 in the Website Grader, for meaningful organic search marketing. Because successful search marketing can provide such lucrative results to a business “winning” is now a matter of very small percentages. The difference of 1-3 percent in either of these tools can mean your site will not appear high enough in organic SERPs to gain any visitors. The race is not between sites that score 80% and 90% neither of them maybe winning, it is between the sites at 94% to 99%. So if you want the benefits of organic search you can’t settle with being better than 80% of websites. You need to be better than 95% percent of them.

Finally, just one note of caution in using the tools, don’t follow the tools blindly. Sometimes there is a good reason to vary from their offered guidelines. Just know your purpose in doing it.

As always, if you have a question send me an email.

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, SEO, Tools and Tips Tagged With: Firefox, Internet Marketing, measurements, search engine optimization, Search Engines, search marketing, search optimization, SEO, web/blogsites, website marketing

A Dream Wedding by Sharon Replaces Their Old Bludomain Flash Website with a New WordPress Site

July 12, 2010 by Marc 2 Comments

Well known San Diego wedding planner Sharon Cole of A Dream Wedding by Sharon contacted me regarding improving her search engine marketing and internet presence. For a number of years she had been using a Bludomain website but recently found that with increasing competition, her website traffic and leads had become almost nil. This is in spite of her being an area ABC leader and the all the awards and news paper articles and links she had developed over the years in business in San Diego.

In looking into her site’s presence, we discovered that her website was virtually not present in Google’s index. Even Google searching with her business name and city the site was not found. The reason for this is because the inherently low “indexability” of a Bludomain site combined with no changes to the site in years. Effectively the search engine calculated that the site was just not relevant for what people may be searching. You see, most Bludomain websites really only have two actual pages, the splash page and the rest of the Flash website. The website itself is functionally just one page of Flash content with different actions. When we discussed all this the plan became multi-faceted and clear.

Sharon and Maria (her office manager) improved the legacy splash page text content and began using Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics to begin to “wake” up the site. I helped Maria install WordPress on the Bludomain hosting account and behind the scenes started to create an all new WordPress based website for A Dream Wedding by Sharon. A little progress, Sharon’s legacy site returned to Google’s index, though very far down in the listings.

But the Bludomain hosting account was very troublesome for WordPress. The blog was always a struggle with loading plugins and having errors. Bludomain’s hosting setup is often not a very friendly enviroment for WordPress, more so with WP 3.0. So the new WP based website would be based on a non-Bludomain server. (When the time came to choose whether the legacy Bludomain site would be kept, moved or dropped it was decided, after Bludomain quoted $80 to move it for what was effectively 2 indexed pages, that the site would be allowed to “fade away” and the savings used elsewhere.)

It’s done, and Sharon feels the new site is a great fresh look for her San Diego wedding planning business, and not like a typical blog site. And it succeeds in Google, search marketing and social media marketing. The new site already has well over 90 pages in Google index, is moving up in search placement and search traffic and best of all the site traffic has increased almost 10 fold. Plus it is easy to add new information, pages and posts to it to tailor internet marketing to the interest of today’s bride to be. When Sharon adds new content to the site it automatically Tweets the news and posts content to Facebook. And, not to forget that the new site is also viewable in iPhones and other mobile devices where her Bludomain site was not.

Please visit and take a look at A Dream Wedding by Sharon’s new web/blogsite. If you have questions about Bludomain SEO, internet marketing or WordPress based web/blog sites please send me an email.

Filed Under: BluDomain, Featured, Portfolio, Websites Tagged With: BluDomain, Facebook, Flash, Internet Marketing, marketing, search engine optimization, Search Engines, search marketing, search optimization, social media, twitter, web/blogsites, Websites, Wedding Marketing, WordPress

How to Import Your Website Blog into Your Facebook Business Page

July 12, 2010 by Marc Leave a Comment

UPDATE: Importing a blog into a Facebook business page is no longer supported by Facebook. Please see this post for more details – You can no longer feed your blog to your Facebook page. To import a blog or other pages from your website you will need to create a custom tab for your Facebook busines page. More on how to do that soon.

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Here is the how-to for automatically importing your website’s blog posts onto your Facebook business page. It is not very complicated, but it is not very intuitive either so it made sense to share the instructions in a short video.

As I mention in the video it can take a while before Facebook recognizes your website blog, but be persistent it will work eventually and it is well worth it from both a social media marketing effort as well as enhanced search engine presence. If you have any questions send me an email.

Filed Under: Social Networks, Tools and Tips, WordPress Tagged With: Blogs, blogsites, Facebook, search marketing, SEM, SEO, SMO, social media

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