5 Ways to make WordPress website faster

Wordpress is one of the most popular platforms used for building websites. The only shortcoming of building a heavy site with wordpress is that it can become a little slow. Here are some of the basic precautions to take care of before you make your wordpress website live or even better if they are taken care from the start point of the website:

Optimise images and DB tables:

When a potential customer opens up your website, you only have a few seconds to grab the attention. The larger your images, the higher it takes for your page to load which makes the customer leave the website. The images that you upload on your site must be optimised using a tool like TinyPNG or you can also do this in photoshop. Luckily there are also some wordpress plugins available that can do image optimisation for the entire site just by the click of a button. This is not only good for the site performance but also for SEO. Google considers speed as one of the important factors for ranking.

Database needs to be optimised so that extra unwanted space can be removed and your database can run smoothly. You can do this manually from PHPmyadmin or even use database optimisation plugins provided by wordpress.

Compress CSS/JS:

Compressing CSS and JS is basically removing extra spaces from the code so that it gives faster response. There are plugins available in wordpress that can handle this for you so that you don't have to do this manually.

Build a lightweight theme:

Use the best framework right from the beginning that makes your theme light. Genesis of thesis theme frameworks work best for the themes. Thesis is an amazing framework which wont make your site slow with many plugins installed.

Use cache plugin:

A good cache plugin lowers the load time as the elements are cached. I recommend W3 total cache plugin. It is free, easy to use and works incredibly well without any issues.

Use good quality hosting:

For all of the above to work effectively, it is essential to have a hosting that is fast, that can handle traffic and has minimum down time. Do not go for shared hosting even if it looks like a good bargain.

We hope the above round-up has helped you to understand how to make your wordpress website load faster. If you need professional help to nail this perfectly, hire wordpress developer India to take care of your WordPress website development.

6 Website Design Trends to Use When You Sell Products/Services Online

Have a fresh looking website:

Your website must be attractive and follow latest web standards. You cannot have visitors browsing an outdated website. Your website is the virtual representation of who you are and visitors will form an opinion about your company by looking at your website.

Have an attractive and neat banner: A sleek, stylish rotating banner module with some great offers or just on-point display of your services with a call to action button can get majority of visitors click on it and browse the inner pages. If you are a product website, you can place some of your best products on the banner in the best possible visual manner. If you are a service based website, put the best of your services in the banners which describe what you do and tempt visitors to learn more about them.

Have opt-in in the first fold: You would want to build your customer base so that you can send offers/newsletters to them in future. Having a well designed contact form or opt-in in the first fold of the website leaves a good impression on the visitors.

Have testimonials on home page: Testimonials hold their own importance. When you have testimonials serving for different services/products that you sell, visitors trust you more that you are good in many departments and people have had a good experience with your company.

Social handles: Showing your social handles and likes/followers on your social media imbibes that trust in the visitors. You can also have a social proof incorporated into your website if there is any. Something like - Check out our ratings on trustpilot or google reviews. It will also bring your more followers and thereby increase your customer base.

Locations you serve: If you are a product-selling website, it is important to mention with a google map the locations that you serve. If someone has already purchased your product and then comes to know you do not deliver to that area, it will leave a wrong impression.

I hope these trends help you to design your website. If you are looking for a professional website design India, hire a website designer and get started. Feel free to visit us on www.kinsh.in

Handy tips for responsive web design

The concept of designing websites just for desktops is truly over. Developers now build websites thinking how well they can display it across various devices.  Browsing over phone has taken over the traditional desktop browsing. So here are few tips for you to keep in mind while designing your next website:

Use limited contents

Not all your website content needs to be there in the mobile version. Mobile screens are smaller and we cant expect the users to keep scrolling to read the whole page. Limit the number of scrolls and craft content such that important points are conveyed and less important ones are skipped. Prioritise your elements and keep only the adequate stuff. Minimisation is the key that works. 

Use clear typography

Typography is very important for responsive website design. Use the right fonts and the right size so that users don't have to squint their eyes to read the lines. Keep the text clear and test throughly in various devices instead of just relying on emulators. Remember, a lot of users do not have high end phones with fast processors and high resolutions. So make sure you test your site in various devices.Nothing beats actual device testing.

Paddings and margins

Replace margins with paddings. Margins increase the space around the buttons/images. While if you use paddings for the space that you want for your button, the click area is increased. 

Page loading

Nobody has the patience to wait for your website to load if its taking more than 5 seconds. Make sure you have optimised images, minimised scripts and CSS so that your page doesnt take too long to load.  

Images

Not just the size and alignment of images but the quality of images is as important. While large images affect the load time, bad quality images create a strong negative impact on the users and they start doubting your capabilities. 

Hope these tips help you design a clean and easy to use responsive website. Are you looking for someone who is an expert in responsive website design? We can help. Contact us to get started.

5 Reasons to chose Flat design

Flat design is a trend that is here to stay. Its beautiful because of its simplicity and that’s what viewers are liking about it. It doesn’t demand your attention yet it is catchy in its own way. This simple, aesthetic design style has taken the website design world by storm.  

Simple yet sharp

Flat design is on point. no flattering shadows, over-the-top effects or any unnecessary elements. It is always nice to navigate through a website that is easy to understand and where all the elements are arranged nicely. The icons, buttons everything has a minimalistic feel but still leaves the impact. Simplicity is an art.

Loads fast

In this fast paced world, why would a visitor want to wait for you site to load all its graphics? Earn the extra brownie points by opting for flat design. Since there are less decorative elements like shadows, gradients etc that are usually heavy, the site made using flat design certainly loads fast. 

Better user experience

The whole idea behind flat design is to create a clutter-free website with a clean design where things are in place and there are no complex graphics or fancy stuff overlapping each other. Apart from looking extremely professional, flat design serves for a great UI. It gives user the ease to navigate through the website, to locate things and understand the flow without extra efforts.

Works seamlessly for mobile

Knowing the importance of getting the website right in mobile devices, flat design hugely favoured because of the way it seamlessly gets carried onto mobile devices. For a perfect mobile friendly website, the site should load fast on the phones and be clean because the screen is not going to be huge. This agenda is achieved easily with flat design. 

Great use of colors and typography

With flat design, it is a almost like a color fest which is a huge shift from boring standard website colors being used repeatedly for every other website we open. Use of colors unapologetically has brought lives to the websites. Flat designs are usually accompanied by some amazing typography for the headings which brings out the creativity out the designer without being restricted to the standard fonts.

So what are you thinking about? Its high time to adapt to new trends and ideas If you are looking for an expert who can create a crisp, sophisticated website for you with clever use of flat design, feel free to contact us. Kinsh Technologies provides off-shore website designing services to clients from various countries like the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and India. Hire Website Designer form India for your specific requirements.

Developing a wordpress theme from scratch

To get started with your wordpress site, you first need to download and install wordpress. Setting up wordpress is pretty easy. Visit their official site to do this.  

Once you have completed your HTML, you can start integrating your HTML into wordpress. Starting with the theme creation, firstly create your theme folder under wp-content/themes directory. Create a new directory there of your theme name.

There are 2 main files that you need to create initially - index.php and style.css. Declare your theme like below: 

Rename your index.html file that you had created to index.php. Your theme is now created and it will show under Appearance -> Themes. Go ahead and activate it. Technically your theme is ready. Now all you need to do is convert your static code into dynamic code and start dividing your page into various sections as per wordpress standards.

So your theme will comprise of

index.php

header.php

footer.php

sidebar.php 

functions.php

1. header.php

First step towards making code dynamic is to start with moving all your header code to header.php and including it in your index file as  

<?php get_header();  ?>

Your css will be included in header file now with a dynamic path as below:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />

2)  footer.php

Like header you will have the footer file included as <?php get_footer(); ?> by moving footer code to footer.php

You need to create widgets using functions.php and include in your header/footer or wherever necessary. Here is the code example: 

3) sidebar.php

This is needed when you have a left or a right column in your website. Most of the websites have and if its a blog website, you will certainly want to have one. Include all you sidebar code in this file and simply call this file in your index.php

4) functions.php 

All the widgets that you need in the site, need to be create in this file. See example below for the syntax:

5) index.php

So your index file now only has references to all your files. You are simply calling all your files here.

<?php get_header(); ?>

<div class="row">

<div class="col-sm-8 blog-main">

<?php get_template_part( 'content', get_post_format() ); ?>

</div>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

</div> <!-- /.row -->

<?php get_footer(); ?>

Thats it! The theme is ready to fetch things dynamically exactly like a wordpress site should. 

If you need professional help with your wordpress site, hire wordpress developer India that can provide you quality services at affordable rates. For more information please visit www.kinsh.in.