You’ve just installed your new WordPress site and now you want to know what to do next. Well, if you purchased one of our themes, you’ll be able to follow our very detailed documentation on how to get your site to look like the demo.

Aside from that there are a few little things with WordPress fresh install that you’ll want to change immediately.

1. Change the URL Structure of your Site

Ok, you’re working through your site checklist and creating great articles for your customers to read, but when you look at the post online you see numbers at the end like this:

WordPress uses a permalink structure which shows the post ID number instead of a friendly title.

Don’t worry, you can change this quickly with just a few clicks. Go to Settings–>Permalinks and choose a different structure. A popular structure you can use is the one with your post name in the URL like:

http://example.com/post-name

Save your changes and now all your posts will show the descriptive URL structure rather than the unhelpful numbers.

2. Create a Custom Homepage in WordPress

By default a WordPress site is setup to show the latest blog posts on your homepage. And while that’s ok, you really want to setup a site that is more focused around your business. Say you have a lawn care business or a salon and you want to show a specific homepage, services, about, and contact pages.

Setting up your custom homepage is pretty easy.

First you want to create a page that will be your homepage. From your admin area go to Pages–>Add New and name your page. You can fill in the details later. Click publish to finish.

Now go to Settings–>Reading and under the Front page display area, choose A static page radio and pick your homepage from the frontpage dropdown.  You can choose another page for the blog posts or just leave that dropdown alone if you aren’t setting up a blog page. Click save changes.

Now you can go to your site to review the changes you’ve made to it.

3. Add Categories to Your Site

While you create all the articles you want to share on your site, you’ll notice that you can group several of them together into similar topics. These topics can be placed in categories on your website and it’ll help organize your site’s structure as well as help with search engine optimization.

For example, you’re getting your accounting website setup and you want to talk about small business tax questions, tax returns, and deductions. You can create these three different categories by going to Posts–>Category from your admin dashboard. Create the three categories and save your changes.

Note: You’ll see a category there called “uncategorized”. You can’t delete it, but you can edit it to one of your category names that you want to use. I’d recommend using your most popular category since all new posts are initially tied to the default category for all your posts unless you change it. When you write your articles, you’ll be able to choose from the list of categories for your blog posts.

I hope this article helped you learn 3 tweaks you can use to customize your site immediately to make it to look how you want in WordPress.

For feedback and questions please leave us a comment or reach us on Twitter @ThemeLab.

The post Do These 3 Simple Tweaks to Your WordPress Site appeared first on IsItWP – WordPress Technology Lookup Tool.

You’ve just installed your new WordPress site and now you want to know what to do next. Well, if you purchased one of our themes, you’ll be able to follow our very detailed documentation on how to get your site to look like the demo.

Aside from that there are a few little things with WordPress fresh install that you’ll want to change immediately.

1. Change the URL Structure of your Site

Ok, you’re working through your site checklist and creating great articles for your customers to read, but when you look at the post online you see numbers at the end like this:

WordPress uses a permalink structure which shows the post ID number instead of a friendly title.

Don’t worry, you can change this quickly with just a few clicks. Go to Settings–>Permalinks and choose a different structure. A popular structure you can use is the one with your post name in the URL like:

http://example.com/post-name

Save your changes and now all your posts will show the descriptive URL structure rather than the unhelpful numbers.

2. Create a Custom Homepage in WordPress

By default a WordPress site is setup to show the latest blog posts on your homepage. And while that’s ok, you really want to setup a site that is more focused around your business. Say you have a lawn care business or a salon and you want to show a specific homepage, services, about, and contact pages.

Setting up your custom homepage is pretty easy.

First you want to create a page that will be your homepage. From your admin area go to Pages–>Add New and name your page. You can fill in the details later. Click publish to finish.

Now go to Settings–>Reading and under the Front page display area, choose A static page radio and pick your homepage from the frontpage dropdown.  You can choose another page for the blog posts or just leave that dropdown alone if you aren’t setting up a blog page. Click save changes.

Now you can go to your site to review the changes you’ve made to it.

3. Add Categories to Your Site

While you create all the articles you want to share on your site, you’ll notice that you can group several of them together into similar topics. These topics can be placed in categories on your website and it’ll help organize your site’s structure as well as help with search engine optimization.

For example, you’re getting your accounting website setup and you want to talk about small business tax questions, tax returns, and deductions. You can create these three different categories by going to Posts–>Category from your admin dashboard. Create the three categories and save your changes.

Note: You’ll see a category there called “uncategorized”. You can’t delete it, but you can edit it to one of your category names that you want to use. I’d recommend using your most popular category since all new posts are initially tied to the default category for all your posts unless you change it. When you write your articles, you’ll be able to choose from the list of categories for your blog posts.

I hope this article helped you learn 3 tweaks you can use to customize your site immediately to make it to look how you want in WordPress.

For feedback and questions please leave us a comment or reach us on Twitter @ThemeLab.

The post Do These 3 Simple Tweaks to Your WordPress Site appeared first on IsItWP – WordPress Technology Lookup Tool.

You’ve just installed your new WordPress site and now you want to know what to do next. Well, if you purchased one of our themes, you’ll be able to follow our very detailed documentation on how to get your site to look like the demo.

Aside from that there are a few little things with WordPress fresh install that you’ll want to change immediately.

1. Change the URL Structure of your Site

Ok, you’re working through your site checklist and creating great articles for your customers to read, but when you look at the post online you see numbers at the end like this:

WordPress uses a permalink structure which shows the post ID number instead of a friendly title.

Don’t worry, you can change this quickly with just a few clicks. Go to Settings–>Permalinks and choose a different structure. A popular structure you can use is the one with your post name in the URL like:

http://example.com/post-name

Save your changes and now all your posts will show the descriptive URL structure rather than the unhelpful numbers.

2. Create a Custom Homepage in WordPress

By default a WordPress site is setup to show the latest blog posts on your homepage. And while that’s ok, you really want to setup a site that is more focused around your business. Say you have a lawn care business or a salon and you want to show a specific homepage, services, about, and contact pages.

Setting up your custom homepage is pretty easy.

First you want to create a page that will be your homepage. From your admin area go to Pages–>Add New and name your page. You can fill in the details later. Click publish to finish.

Now go to Settings–>Reading and under the Front page display area, choose A static page radio and pick your homepage from the frontpage dropdown.  You can choose another page for the blog posts or just leave that dropdown alone if you aren’t setting up a blog page. Click save changes.

Now you can go to your site to review the changes you’ve made to it.

3. Add Categories to Your Site

While you create all the articles you want to share on your site, you’ll notice that you can group several of them together into similar topics. These topics can be placed in categories on your website and it’ll help organize your site’s structure as well as help with search engine optimization.

For example, you’re getting your accounting website setup and you want to talk about small business tax questions, tax returns, and deductions. You can create these three different categories by going to Posts–>Category from your admin dashboard. Create the three categories and save your changes.

Note: You’ll see a category there called “uncategorized”. You can’t delete it, but you can edit it to one of your category names that you want to use. I’d recommend using your most popular category since all new posts are initially tied to the default category for all your posts unless you change it. When you write your articles, you’ll be able to choose from the list of categories for your blog posts.

I hope this article helped you learn 3 tweaks you can use to customize your site immediately to make it to look how you want in WordPress.

For feedback and questions please leave us a comment or reach us on Twitter @ThemeLab.

The post Do These 3 Simple Tweaks to Your WordPress Site appeared first on ThemeLab.

You’ve just installed your new WordPress site and now you want to know what to do next. Well, if you purchased one of our themes, you’ll be able to follow our very detailed documentation on how to get your site to look like the demo.

Aside from that there are a few little things with WordPress fresh install that you’ll want to change immediately.

1. Change the URL Structure of your Site

Ok, you’re working through your site checklist and creating great articles for your customers to read, but when you look at the post online you see numbers at the end like this:

WordPress uses a permalink structure which shows the post ID number instead of a friendly title.

Don’t worry, you can change this quickly with just a few clicks. Go to Settings–>Permalinks and choose a different structure. A popular structure you can use is the one with your post name in the URL like:

http://example.com/post-name

Save your changes and now all your posts will show the descriptive URL structure rather than the unhelpful numbers.

2. Create a Custom Homepage in WordPress

By default a WordPress site is setup to show the latest blog posts on your homepage. And while that’s ok, you really want to setup a site that is more focused around your business. Say you have a lawn care business or a salon and you want to show a specific homepage, services, about, and contact pages.

Setting up your custom homepage is pretty easy.

First you want to create a page that will be your homepage. From your admin area go to Pages–>Add New and name your page. You can fill in the details later. Click publish to finish.

Now go to Settings–>Reading and under the Front page display area, choose A static page radio and pick your homepage from the frontpage dropdown.  You can choose another page for the blog posts or just leave that dropdown alone if you aren’t setting up a blog page. Click save changes.

Now you can go to your site to review the changes you’ve made to it.

3. Add Categories to Your Site

While you create all the articles you want to share on your site, you’ll notice that you can group several of them together into similar topics. These topics can be placed in categories on your website and it’ll help organize your site’s structure as well as help with search engine optimization.

For example, you’re getting your accounting website setup and you want to talk about small business tax questions, tax returns, and deductions. You can create these three different categories by going to Posts–>Category from your admin dashboard. Create the three categories and save your changes.

Note: You’ll see a category there called “uncategorized”. You can’t delete it, but you can edit it to one of your category names that you want to use. I’d recommend using your most popular category since all new posts are initially tied to the default category for all your posts unless you change it. When you write your articles, you’ll be able to choose from the list of categories for your blog posts.

I hope this article helped you learn 3 tweaks you can use to customize your site immediately to make it to look how you want in WordPress.

For feedback and questions please leave us a comment or reach us on Twitter @ThemeLab.

The post Do These 3 Simple Tweaks to Your WordPress Site appeared first on ThemeLab.

Yesterday I had a friend ask how to get more likes on Facebook. She and her business partner have been working on their business for about a year, but their Facebook likes aren’t moving in the right direction and they use it as their main marketing source. After sharing some ideas with her I thought it would be a great article as well.

In this post I’ll share with you some of the thing that are working right now on how to get more likes on Facebook.

Fill out the About Section

Enter all the detailed information about your business in the About section. Use keywords people use to find the products or services that you offer. If you do this part right, your Facebook page can rank pretty high in local search engine results and people will find what they need with your business.

Write More Engaging Posts

Stop all the sales messages.

I looked through my friends Facebook page and all they do is share the latest sales or the latest items for purchase. It’s fine to market your business,  but you need to keep those types of posts to a minimum.

People are being sold to more and more today so they just ignore those messages and scroll right past a sale item. And they won’t like, comment or share those posts either.

Instead, engage with your fans by asking a question. Posts with questions get 100% more comments than posts that don’t.

Add Relevant Images

Another way to increase engagement is to add a post with an photo. Imaged posts get far more engagement than just links or just a text status update. A lot of people love the inspirational quote on an image so try that out for your audience.

Creating images with text on them is not difficult at all. There are several online image editing programs that let you use free or paid for images or upload your own and they give you an easy way to add your text or different backgrounds.

One of the easiest photo creation programs out there right now is Canva.

The software makes it easy for you to create a Facebook post image quickly and painlessly. They even have the default image sizes for Facebook so you can create in minutes and share it with your Facebook fans.

Use a Call to Action

Invite your fans to like, share, or comment. They are more likely to do what you asked, especially if they are feeling engaged with your content.

Be active on your page. When someone comments or likes a post, reply to them with your thoughts or just thank them for sharing. Facebook is a very social site and interactive with your fans goes a long way to growing your fanbase.

Be Consistent

Consistency is a big factor in growing your Facebook likes. As the page owner, you have several insights for your page. If your page has at least 50 likes, then you’ll see when your fans are more likely to be online, their age and gender ratio so you can start targeting your posts to their needs.

To help you with consistency, you can bulk schedule your posts for the upcoming week. Batch several together at once rather than remembering to do it everyday will help you stay consistent. When you schedule them out, make sure you’re posting 1-2 times a day and only 1-4 times a week, which gives you better engagement than posting more often.

Test Everything

Test your post frequency, the type of posts, the length of your post, etc. Just because the results were better for other Facebook pages, you’ll want to see how your fans interact with your brand. You have to be willing to try different things and see what kind of results you get.

Use Facebook Ads

Say you’re a new salon and you’re setting up shop in a local community, consider using Facebook’s new Local Awareness ad. The ad will target people who are near your business.

Cross Promote

You’re not the only one trying to grow your Facebook page. Look for other Facebook pages that can complement yours. Reach out to the page admin and offer a shout out for shout out deal. The concept is that you’ll send a shout out post on your page to the other Facebook page and they do the same thing for you.

This works best if you target Facebook pages that have about the same likes as you. Someone with 30,000 fans might not think a shout out from your page with 1,000 likes will be worth it to them.

Don’t forget to do all the “usual” stuff

• Add your Facebook link to all your printed material.
• Add a link to your Facebook page in your email signature.
• From your Facebook profile, add your Facebook page to your about section
• Invite all your friends and email contacts to like your page.
• Make it easy to link to you by creating a Facebook vanity url

Go through this list and start implementing the tasks and watch your likes on Facebook grow.

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The post How to Get More Likes on Facebook appeared first on IsItWP – WordPress Technology Lookup Tool.