SlideDeck Plugin for Great Looking and Responsive Website Sliders

SlideDeck is one of the most established slider plugins that is available for WordPress, first introduced in the year 2009. Today, they have launched a 3.0 version of the plugin which has a lot of improvements to the SEO, speed with a responsive facility.

With the help of the plugin, you can get great looking plugins with a lot of options for the customization.

Some of the plugin features are as follow:

·         Twelve Lenses:

There are 12 lenses which you can choose from the slider display and can easily change and edit according to your requirements from scratch.

·         Multiple Options for Content

You can have HTML, Videos, Text and Images also published.

·         Dynamic Sources of Content

You can put in the content from the social sites such as Facebook, Flickr, Dribble and so on.

There are options for you to change the fonts, effects, navigation options and an addition of your own CSS.

·         Multiple Uses

You can use the slider into the themes, posts/pages according to your choice.

INSTALLATION AND SETUP

After you have successfully downloaded and activated the plugin, the very first step, you need to do is to enter the keys for a license, enabling the automatic updates and support. This you can easily do by visiting the “Slide Deck” -> “Advanced Options” in the menu items.

When you are on this page, you will see an option through which you can turn the JS and CSS off for every page if you want. As you don’t need the slider on every page and this option makes a lot of sense.

Also, at the bottom of the page, you can put in details such as Twitter username, API Keys for the Google+, YouTube, Dribble, and Instagram.

Use Lenses

Under the option of “SlideDeck”->Lenses, you would find the available listed lenses. These are actually the styles which control the appearance of the slider. There are 12 available sliders, with 9 free ones and 3 premium ones costing $9 each or all 3 for $24.

You can also create a new lens from scratch, and copy the existing lenses to edit it. However, you need to do the changes in CSS and if you don’t have any knowledge regarding CSS, you can hire a professional Medialinkers web design company in Kennesaw.

Create a Slider

For getting started, you first have to create your slider, visit the “Manage” menu link and then choose the “Dynamic Source” option, which is where you can put in all the content from the different sites, and the profiles of social media. The custom content option also allows you to design the slider using videos, text and images etc.

After, you have chosen, which type of slide you would be creating, you need to setup screen, put the name at the top of the slider, and add the source username, API credentials and check the preview of the slider if it’s looking okay.

Underneath the preview option, you can also choose a lense for using the slider. The best part about the plugin is that whenever you click on a new lense, the slider appearance would change automatically without any page refreshes.

After you have chosen the lense, you can then click the “Setup” tab and change some options in it such as the size of slides, overlay etc and your changes will go live.

•    Through the appearance tab, you can change and edit the color scheme.

•    The content tab is where you can change the title length, text options, and date formats.

•    The navigation gives you options such as a keyboard, slide controls, and tough navigation.

•    You can choose slide order, speed and animation from the playback plugin

After, you are happy with all settings, you can choose “Save” and you would be presented with a few options to put the slider on your website. With a button from the visual editor, you can choose to post the slider on the page or a post, depending on your requirements and where you want it to appear.

PRICING

As it’s a premium plugin, the initial price for it is $49 for a regular license and $99 for the professional license, $119 for the developer license containing all the content sources and lenses.

The plugin is extremely easy to activate and use and presents a great looking slider on your website. For more help configuring the plugin or wanting to have one built according to your requirements, feel free to contact our Medialinkers,web design company.

Building Traffic to Your Business Blog in Half an Hour

Even the best of bloggers are unable to get traffic despite having the best and informative content published on the blog. Even if you are publishing content for a week or more, and you are serious about your blogging business, you can still have a low number of followers.

So the question is as to how are you going to get the traffic that you have been blogging for.  You may think that you are wasting time and this would not work for you, but the truth is that blogging does work, but only if the traffic and the trust are yielded to your blog.

You might have seen it that having short blog posts would attract a lot of traffic a decade ago, as not a lot of people were doing it on a consistent basis. However, like everything that becomes popular with the passing of time, blogging also becomes quite famous and common and today you would see a lot of bloggers competing with each other putting better content.  Longer, in-depth and more useful content which has the capacity of becoming viral?

However, the long posts have also become common and it’s not just how you can earn the traffic that you have been waiting for. The secret for gaining traffic is to implement some common sense tips which can easily be done under 30 minutes.

Quick Ways for Driving Traffic to Your Blog in less than 30 Minutes

Build Up a Story

Everyone writes a blog, but what would truly stand out is if you consider adding a story to the blog post.  There are bloggers such as Kevin Duncan, who utilize this method to gain the attention of the followers. You can start off by writing some engaging anecdotes which would build a connection with the readers’ right at the blog’s starting point to get a lot of hooked readers.

Pick a traffic-boosting topic

No matter how much information you have put on the web, it’s quite needless to say that if the topic is unattractive, it wouldn’t attract any traffic anytime soon. To be able to know how you can start writing on the topics that are popular, you can take help from places such as Google Trends, Buzzsumo and Feedly to see what type of topics trend and gains the most traffic. What you can do is think of all the areas that you have got information to write on. Then write what will interest you the most. Then pick the topics which are in demand by searching through buzzsumo etc.

Analyze the headlines before putting the content

You can use headline analyzer such as CoSchedule after you have written the post, to copy and paste the headline to the free tool. It’s effective and super quick. After, you have punched in a headline; you will get a score based on it. It would give you a grade based on the entire grammar structure and readability. Also, you would get a report consisting of common, uncommon and emotional words. Also, you would get cool tips for improving the headline for free and under a few minutes.

Going visual

Always create interesting visuals and images, if you want to engage with your followers. Humans have a very short span of attention, and with the help of the visual content, you can increase such content. No one has enough time to read the entire thing, which means with the help of crafted images, you can make the viewers and readers in retaining their attention. Videos, Slides, and infographics are all ways through which you can enhance the viewership of your blog.

Check and Improve Your Blog’s Loading Time

Google considers the loading time as one of the most important factors for getting it ranked on its top pages. According to the researchers, 47% of the readers expect a page to be loaded in 2 seconds. You can do this by reducing the number of plugins and getting rid of all the extra add-ons. You can use a plugin known as Jetpack to have an efficient loading time.

You can also compress the images using Smush to load it conditionally when the readers scroll to the bottom.

Make it Easy for the others to Share Socially

According to a recent study, sharing buttons on the posts lead to 7 times more mentions. All you need to do is to start writing the magnetic headlines, which are brief and short at the same time, so these can be shared via Twitter with the appropriate hashtags.

Answer relevant queries by joining HARO

Help a reporter, commonly known as HARO is a free public service dedicated to bringing qualified reporters and sources together. You can be an expert source or a story lead for a reporter query. You can sign up for free, as it takes only less than 10 minutes for briefly answering the HARO query, to provide you with high-quality inbound blog links.

Turning Visitors into a Lead

You can add a major call-to-action at the end of posts, urging them to read the other posts, clicking a link to the landing page, subscribing to the list to make them do something.

Leveraging the Power of Popular Question Answer Networks Such as Quora

Quora is a fantastic place for answering questions and building a powerful following. With the help of your following on Quora, you can easily gain 1.5 million monthly visitors, adding links to the articles and blog posts through the answer resources.

If you know everything about the topic, it wouldn’t be difficult for you to provide an answer to the questions posted about it. You can follow all the relevant topics for educating your prospects and conversations which are better for your product and service.

Not all of the tips mentioned above would work, but adding a couple of them to your list would certainly help you in building a great following to your blog. For professional assistance on the marketing of your business blog, feel free to contact Medialinkers Kennesaw Web design Company,  specializing in both the branding and marketing of businesses over the entire Atlanta city.