Very good WordPress lovers! As in previous "Come and Ask" events, in this post we are going to summarize the tips that came out in the talk for the two websites that our brave attendees taught us in the Ulab. Very cool both. Thank you both very much. We leave you the presentation that was used to follow the event and it is worth mentioning the merendola that we put between our chest and back thanks to our sponsors: Professional Hosting , your trusted hosting, and Weglot, the plugin to translate your web to the language you want.
The numbers
- Aimed at the talk: 26 people.
- Assistants: 12 people
- It was held on October 21, 2019, in the space that gives us ULab, the co-working center of Alicante.
Important: We remind you that in the tool Slack have a channel registered to organize and to share the management of the meetup, specifically the channel we use is #wpalicante of Slack WordPress Spain. If you want to lend a hand, contribute ideas and become more active part of this community follow the instructions on the following page-> http://wp-es.es/slack/
The III event "Come and ask"
We remind you that the events "Come and ask" are a special kind of meetup where instead of some expert talking about an interesting topic, some attendees (after registration) show us their websites made with WordPress and the rest of the audience we comment on aspects that can be improved and take the opportunity to review interesting concepts.
On this occasion we had the pleasure of seeing the web Paper Letterwhich Lucía Sánchez brought us, and an example of the websites that Pedro García, a Yecla web designer and developer, brought us for the occasion: Bioconstructions Ripoll. We leave you the link to the presentation that we use as a common thread.
What Lucía brought us from letradepapel.com
A very interesting website that includes a solution for new authors who want to publish, as well as translations into English and Italian. It started in 2015 as an end-of-master project and has ended up evolving into what it is today. Lucía's main doubt is how to get a better position in Google to attract more traffic to the web. These are the points that arise from our joint brainstorming:
- Optimize the location of social networks as they should go to the end: Google reads from left to right and from top to bottom. If we put the social networks at the top (very common to place them next to the menu) we are inviting our visitors to leave the web to visit our instagram, facebook ... and what we want is just the opposite, we want them to stay on the web as long as possible.
- Location of the language: in general, nowadays, the language at the top does not add value because the current language plugins are able to redirect the visitor to the page in the correct language by feeding on the one in the browser itself.
- In general, reorder what is shown on the main page thinking about both the visitors "people" and the visitor "Google", which is the one that will position you in search engines. Therefore, we must put the most relevant as above and to the left possible within our Home page, showing the most visited or what we think is most important first. It can be very interesting to check the web mipositioningweb and that it is a perfect example of what to show on the home page for blog-like websites, although it is not the case here.
- In the menu, review everything that is left over for not adding value as well as what is missing that does:
- Remove the option "Home" as there is currently a convention that the logo already redirects you to the Home page, so putting an option in the menu is redundant.
- Remove the blog option: the blog is important to add useful content to the web that positions you, by including keywords and interesting information (helpful) on the subject you're dealing with, but it will be very rare for a visitor to go to the "Blog" option of the menu to look for anything. Therefore, it is better to put it on the foot, as you can see on the web stripe.com.
- It is very useful to have in the same menu (or at its height) a call to action button. In this case it could be "Request a Quote", for example.
- Who we are" page: it is very interesting because it brings the visitor closer and humanizes the people behind the web. In this case, the only thing missing would be to model it to make it more attractive.
- Images of the web: the less you have and the more optimized, the better. Images are necessary because things enter better through the eyes and we read less and less, but it is important that the web load as quickly as possible and images are a handicap for it. Ideally, each image should occupy less than 100kb. To do this, first reduce to 1200 or 1400px width maximum and then optimize for web. Obviously, this is the case whenever you are not dedicated to photography and therefore need to show high quality images, as is the case here, where the photographs only accompany the text. To compress the images, both png and jpg, there is the web karaoke which is free and the quality of the result is unbelievable. There is another website also very good for jpg, but it is paid: jpegmini.com. To optimize images we also have a WP plugin:
- Regarding the optimization of the web, you have so much the talk we gave last year of WordPress Optimization as the presentation that Juan Seguí made in WordCamp Alicante 2017 about WPO (Web Performance Optimization), where he showed 10 tips to improve the WPO in WordPress, and that we have hung in our Youtube channel:
- Buttons that currently appear as "Read More" can be redirected with other text that calls for more action, such as "Start Writing" or "Ask for a Quote". In addition, the intention of the visitor can be directed towards some action in concrete that interests us more than the rest, putting the bigger button, or with a more striking color.
- Beware of the initial sliders, which invite you to look but not to click on the links. They may be good for a photographer who has to show his work, for example, but in general, they are more distracting than helpful.
- For commercial pages, look at the pages of our competitors, especially if they are bigger than us, since it is possible that they have budget to invest in improvements of the web and therefore already have significant improvements that can serve us as guide.
- The texts on the web do not have to be justified, that is to say, that all the lines on the right end at the same height. It's a common usability error, as we tend to use it because it gives us the impression that it looks prettier (more order, alignment, perfection), and we're used to seeing it in the traditional press (on paper). The problem is that browsers are not able to correct in many cases the excessive spaces that remain between many words and this causes many distractions in reading especially in people with visual problems or dyslexia.
The web that Pedro García showed us
Pedro García is a web developer from Yecla and presents us with the latest website he has created for the company. Bioconstructions Ripoll:
We skipped the common comments made to the previous website. So especially for this website we indicate the following:
- For SEO, there is the free RankMath plugin that allows, among many other things, include Rich Snippets to your website, that is, rich texts that show your Google entries with lots of interesting information (such as searches that show the steps of a recipe or the stars you give to a movie when you write a review). It also has an autoindexer so that the Sitemap is reported to Google without having to manually enter the Search Console. It is very useful when we do not publish with a high and/or constant periodicity, which means that Google robots are updating our website less frequently. This way we make sure that our web is updated in Google even if the robots don't go on to verify it.
- When designing the web it is very useful to use the zoom of the browser itself (press simultaneously Ctrl and key "+" or Ctrl and key "-"). So we can see how it will be displayed on higher resolution screens, such as 4K, or lower, such as tablets and mobiles.
- If we want to be contacted by phone, it is better to add a Whatsapp plugin than to put the phone directly, because in the same gesture and without leaving the web can chat with you. The phone forces them to copy it and paste it to call, or even save it as a contact first... One plugin that we have mentioned on other occasions for them is WAME:
- Do not include under any circumstances either on the web or as code type "mailto:" the email address because it is a candy for spamers. What they do is launch search engines through the websites with the "@" symbol to take the whole text string where this symbol appears and use it to send spam. Therefore, if they find the mail as it is, valid, you will start to get spam mail in a matter of weeks and there will be no way to stop it from reaching you, because we do not know how, even if you block it the data runs like gunpowder and you continue to get spam from other addresses. In order to avoid this and for your visitors to be able to contact you, it is best to include a contact form on the website. If we want to put the email address, it's best to add parentheses around the at "(@)" so that if spammers find the address and copy it as it doesn't work for them. The risk of this technique is that customers are not smart and try to write to the email they see on the web without removing the parentheses, so they will not be able to contact you either.
- When it comes to choosing a theme, in WordPress.org there's a lot. There is a Popular tab where there are more than 4000 topics. The important thing is that you have many active installations and that you have extensive documentation on the developer's website. It is also very important that the preparation of the menu is as you want, because it is one of the most difficult elements to modify on a website. Everything else can be layout more easily, and more since Gutenberg entered the life of WordPress.
See you next November 25 in Alicante, in the talk "How to start creating your theme in WordPress". Join the meetup.com Group to receive notifications of all events.