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Building Better Websites That Visitors Love & Make Money

A website is more than just HTML that pops up in visitors' browsers. It's the full experience that goes from the server to the business model. It's about making sure your marketing fits with your content. And that your content fits with your imagery and infrastructure. Building and running a useful website that your visitors love (and makes money) is an ongoing effort that requires coordinating a lot of pieces. That is what this category is all about. Explore!

How To Work With Widgets In WordPress

Nate Shivar Updated February 1, 2016 By Nate Shivar

Disclosure: ShivarWeb may receive a commission when you purchase from companies mentioned on this site. All data & opinions are based on our experience as customers or consultants to customers.

How To Work With Widgets In WordPress

This is part of the Beginner’s Guide To WordPress Series. Here’s how to work with widgets in WordPress.

Want to display a small ad or about snippet on the side of your website? That’s what Widgets are for. Widgets are small little bits of fun and functionality displayed in the footer, header, or sidebar of your website. And yes, WordPress has a handy little area to manage them all. Here’s how to work with widgets in WordPress.

[Read more…] about How To Work With Widgets In WordPress

Read More Posts in This Topic! Filed Under: WordPress Tutorials

How To Work With Menus In WordPress

Nate Shivar Updated February 1, 2016 By Nate Shivar

Disclosure: ShivarWeb may receive a commission when you purchase from companies mentioned on this site. All data & opinions are based on our experience as customers or consultants to customers.

How To Work With Menus In WordPress

This is part of the Beginner’s Guide To WordPress Series. This tutorial covers how to work with menus in WordPress – And the good news is what used to be a pain to create and manage is now a fairly straightforward process.

Your website content doesn’t matter much if visitors can’t find their way around, right? Cue Menus with WordPress. Here’s how to create, manage, and customize your website menus all in WordPress.

[Read more…] about How To Work With Menus In WordPress

Read More Posts in This Topic! Filed Under: WordPress Tutorials

How To Work With The WordPress Media Library

Nate Shivar Updated February 1, 2016 By Nate Shivar

Disclosure: ShivarWeb may receive a commission when you purchase from companies mentioned on this site. All data & opinions are based on our experience as customers or consultants to customers.

How To Work With The WordPress Media Library

This is part of the Beginner’s Guide To WordPress Series. We’ll cover how to work with the WordPress Media Library – so that your images, audio, video, and galleries show up correctly, and are easy to manage.

Just like editing text way back in the day, to make basic edits to your images you had to download, edit and upload them – not anymore!

The media library doesn’t just hold your images and other media. You can actually work with them, edit them and format them all directly on your site without having to worry about downloading them into another program! Here are the basics of WordPress’ Media Library.

[Read more…] about How To Work With The WordPress Media Library

Read More Posts in This Topic! Filed Under: WordPress Tutorials

How To Work With Images in WordPress

Nate Shivar Updated February 1, 2016 By Nate Shivar

Disclosure: ShivarWeb may receive a commission when you purchase from companies mentioned on this site. All data & opinions are based on our experience as customers or consultants to customers.

How To Work With Images in WordPress

This is part of the Beginner’s Guide To WordPress Series. We’ll cover how to work with images in WordPress to make your posts stand out – and look just right.

Great images add tons of life to your website. And just like editing text, or creating links – the backend of WordPress tries to make it easy to work with images on your posts, pages, products, or portfolios (and more). Here’s how to work with images in WordPress.

[Read more…] about How To Work With Images in WordPress

Read More Posts in This Topic! Filed Under: WordPress Tutorials

How To Use The WordPress Visual Editor To Edit Your Site

Nate Shivar Updated February 1, 2016 By Nate Shivar

Disclosure: ShivarWeb may receive a commission when you purchase from companies mentioned on this site. All data & opinions are based on our experience as customers or consultants to customers.

How To Use The WordPress Visual Editor To Edit Your Site

This is part of the Beginner’s Guide To WordPress Series. In this post, I’ll cover how to use the WordPress Visual Editor edit your site quickly and efficiently.

If you wanted to update your website way back when – you had to edit in computer code (with HTML). But nowadays software like WordPress makes editing your site as easy as writing an email.

The Visual Editor is what you use to actually write and edit your content in WordPress.com hosted blogging software. It’s very similar to Word and other processors – here’s a tutorial on how to use it.

[Read more…] about How To Use The WordPress Visual Editor To Edit Your Site

Read More Posts in This Topic! Filed Under: WordPress Tutorials

How To Use WordPress Posts + Pages (step by step)

Nate Shivar Updated February 1, 2016 By Nate Shivar

Disclosure: ShivarWeb may receive a commission when you purchase from companies mentioned on this site. All data & opinions are based on our experience as customers or consultants to customers.

How To Use WordPress Posts + Pages

This is part of the Beginner’s Guide To WordPress Series.

No matter the size or scope of your website – WordPress can be a powerful content management system, which just means that…it helps you manage all the content on your site whether it’s a blog, web page, portfolio, photo gallery, product page, forum, or anything else you can imagine.

By default, WordPress comes with 2 content types – posts and pages. Here are the differences, how to use them, and how to create and delete them.

[Read more…] about How To Use WordPress Posts + Pages (step by step)

Read More Posts in This Topic! Filed Under: WordPress Tutorials

How To Use The WordPress Dashboard + Initial Settings

Nate Shivar Updated February 1, 2016 By Nate Shivar

Disclosure: ShivarWeb may receive a commission when you purchase from companies mentioned on this site. All data & opinions are based on our experience as customers or consultants to customers.

How To Use The WordPress Dashboard + Initial Settings

This is part of the Beginner’s Guide To WordPress Series and covers how to use the WordPress Dashboard, changing your password, and a few of the initial settings – you know the type of stuff you need to know only when you need it.

The Dashboard is what you see right off the bat after installing WordPress and logging into your new website. It’s also known as the ‘backend’ of your website.

WordPress Dashboard

You’ll control everything about your WordPress-powered website from the Dashboard.

Here’s a quick orientation to what the WordPress Dashboard is, how to use the WordPress Dashboard, what the Admin Bar is, how to change your password, and what changes to make immediately upon setup.

[Read more…] about How To Use The WordPress Dashboard + Initial Settings

Read More Posts in This Topic! Filed Under: WordPress Tutorials

How to Protect Your Website from DDoS Attacks

Nate Shivar Updated January 29, 2016 By ShivarWeb Staff

Disclosure: ShivarWeb may receive a commission when you purchase from companies mentioned on this site. All data & opinions are based on our experience as customers or consultants to customers.

Protect Your Website From DDoS Attacks

The following is a contribution from Caroline Black, a writer specializing in Internet Security and technology. A website hack or DDoS attack is one of those things that seems like it could never happen to you…until it does. It’s easier than ever to execute an attack. And targets aren’t just large or controversial organizations – they can even be everyday beauty bloggers. Either way, it pays to be aware of the issue before it happens. Read on!

[Read more…] about How to Protect Your Website from DDoS Attacks

Read More Posts in This Topic! Filed Under: Improving Websites

59+ Ways To Find Free Images For Commercial Use

Nate Shivar Updated December 4, 2015 By Nate Shivar

Disclosure: ShivarWeb may receive a commission when you purchase from companies mentioned on this site. All data & opinions are based on our experience as customers or consultants to customers.

59+ Ways To Find Free Images For Commercial Use

Finding truly free images for commercial use is a confusing pain. There are a few things going on.

First, photographers (sensibly) do not give free images restriction-free. And violating those restrictions can result in bad, expensive consequences for your business.

Second, there are incentives for photographers to give free images to businesses with license restrictions. And there are businesses that would rather follow license restrictions than spend budget on good imagery.

Third, many times photographers want to offer the general public images for free, but also reserve the right to charge businesses.

And so – we’re left with a confusing situation for honest businesses on a budget. And unfortunately, there plenty of lists of “free images” on the Internet that blindly list image websites that offer images that are not truly free.

They have license restrictions for businesses, require email registration, require watermarks, or generally go beyond the Creative Commons commercially allowed licenses.

So! I have reviewed 200+ “free image” websites and curated them into this list of 59+ image sources or search tools to find truly free images for commercial use. [Read more…] about 59+ Ways To Find Free Images For Commercial Use

Read More Posts in This Topic! Filed Under: Improving Websites

How To Sell The Importance of Content Marketing With 4 Angles

Nate Shivar Updated November 6, 2015 By Katelyn Dramis

Disclosure: ShivarWeb may receive a commission when you purchase from companies mentioned on this site. All data & opinions are based on our experience as customers or consultants to customers.

How To Sell The Importance of Content Marketing With 4 Angles

The following is a contribution from Katelyn Dramis, a content strategist, writer, and currently Content Lead at Nebo. Whether you are developing a marketing strategy for yourself or a client, repeating the cliche that “content is important” will not get you very far. But what does make it worthwhile? That’s what Katelyn distills into 4 key angles. Enjoy!

[Read more…] about How To Sell The Importance of Content Marketing With 4 Angles

Read More Posts in This Topic! Filed Under: Improving Websites

How to Build an Auction Website Like eBay from Scratch

Nate Shivar Updated May 14, 2015 By Nate Shivar

Disclosure: ShivarWeb may receive a commission when you purchase from companies mentioned on this site. All data & opinions are based on our experience as customers or consultants to customers.

Setup An Ebay-Style Auctions Website with WordPress
Setup An Ebay-Style Auctions Website with WordPress

This guide covers how to build an auction website like eBay. We’ll be using WordPress software, the WP Auctions plugin to build out the foundation & bidding function with additional next steps to grow the site further if needed.

We’ll walk through how to build everything 100% from scratch, so that you can get up and running quickly with no previous knowledge necessary.

You may have heard of WordPress as a blogging platform. That is how it started out, but it has been transformed over the years into a versatile “content management system” – ie, it gives you a backend to create, edit and manage any type of content – including auction/bidding content.

Before we dive in though, keep in mind that setting up an auctions site with WordPress is not the best fit for everyone.

Here’s generally how I’d break it out. Using WordPress to set up an auction marketplace like eBay will be a good fit if:

  • You want something relatively small (ie, not a multi-million dollar platform like eBay) for your personal use, event auction, small business, non-profit, or to get a concept up and running before investing thousands of dollars in a custom development.
  • You want full control over your site (ie, you don’t want to outsource your auction to an existing solution like eBay).
  • You want to avoid the fees and lock-in of other platforms built for non-profits and event auctions.
  • You aren’t daunted by a bit of technical work (ie, hearing the acronym “FTP” makes you more curious than afraid).
  • You want a common platform that has a large community of developers so that you can expand easily if needed.

WordPress will not be a good fit for you if:

  • You are building out a large established auction focused business.
  • You want all the technical details taken care of for you
  • You want dedicated customer support line

If using WordPress for your auction website does not look like a good fit, then I’d recommend using a solution like Bidding Owl.

Otherwise let’s dive into the guide!

Quick disclosure: I receive customer referral fees from companies mentioned in this post. All my opinions are based on my experience as a paying customer or consultant to a paying customer.

Getting Started – Setting Up The Website

Your absolute first step for setting up a marketplace/auction website is to get a domain name (ie, your web address) pointed to a hosting account (ie, where your website lives). And then to install WordPress on your hosting account so that you can log in, set it up and customize it.

Here’s my guide to setting up WordPress step by step on hosting with a domain from scratch.

One thing to keep in mind with hosts is that auction sites need even more memory for PHP than a standard WordPress install since they can be more complex and use more memory than a simple blog.

If you’re starting out small (a few auctions, low thousands of visitors per month), a shared linux hosting account (like the one I mentioned in the setup guide) is good, but it needs to have more than 64M of memory…preferably 256M.

For hosting, I recommend HostGator (see their plans here), with InMotion Hosting and BlueHost (see their plans here) also being good options (I’ve reviewed each here, here, and here).

If you’re starting out big (lots of auctions, many thousands of visitors per month), you’re going to need either a managed hosting account from a company like WP Engine or a VPS hosting account from HostGator.

Here’s my guide to setting up WordPress step by step on hosting with a domain from scratch.

Installing WP Auctions Plugin

Now that you have WordPress installed, we’re going to use a plugin to extend the functionality of WordPress so that you can run auctions.

There’s several auction plugins available, but the most straightforward and reliable one right now is WP Auctions. It’s a paid plugin for $35 to $89 (depending on your plan) as a one-time fee. In my research, the fee was worth it given the quality and support of the plugin. The free auction plugins options had too much adware, suspect code, and infrequent updates to be worthwhile. If you choose another, these instruction will be similar, but the remainder will use WP Auctions as the example.

Here’s WP Auctions’ sales pitch and tutorial (a bit dated, but still relevant) –

First, go to WP Auctions and purchase the plugin.

Second, download the plugin to a folder on your computer.

Third, login to your WordPress install. In the Dashboard, go to Plugins → Add New. Upload the plugin folder from your computer and install. Once installed, activate the plugin and we can dive into setting it up.

Install WP Auctions Plugin

Setting Up WP Auctions

WP Auctions Overview

Everything for WP Auctions is under the WP Auctions tab located in the sidebar of the dashboard. It comes fully functional out of the box with options to customize the design and notification options.

There are a few settings to adjust initially by going to the Auction Settings section.

WP Auctions General Settings

Under General Settings:

  • Rename your Auction Title to your brand or event
  • Review other settings. I recommend keeping the default until you have set up your first test auction.
  • Choose your auction “engine.” Proxy bidding, the default, is the most well-known online since it is the default for sites like eBay. Bidders enter their maximum bid and the engine automatically raises the bid until your max bid is eliminated. You can also run a traditional (Simple) bidding system or a reverse auction.
  • Click Update Options

Under Payment Settings:

WP Auctions Payment Settings
  • Enter your PayPal account
  • Click update options
  • Enter a URL for a payments page, such as [yoursite].com/payments
  • Next, Add A New Page with the Pages link in the sidebar. In the main editor, add the shortcode [wpapayment] and name the page Payments. Publish it and confirm that it has the same URL as the payments page you entered earlier in Auction Settings.
  • Return to payments settings under Auction Settings and resume entering payment details as necessary.
  • Review and update options

Under Other Settings:

WP Auctions Other Settings

Note the setting for Default Auction Page. You’ll do the same process as the payments page earlier. Head to Pages → Add New Page and publish a page with [wpadisplay] in the editor. Note the URL. I recommend just naming it Auctions.

WP Auctions New Auction Page

Head back to Other Settings and enter that URL beside Default Auction Page.

This page will show all your ongoing auctions. The remainder can stay default until after setting up your first auction. Review and update options.

Creating Your First Auction

Navigate to New Auctions.

New Auction!

The process is very straightforward with self-explanatory fields (ie “description”) available.

There is a field for “Show Auction in AJAX Popup?” – this field makes the auction a pop up window instead of its own page within WordPress. Enable this option if you don’t want a page dedicated to each auction, and would prefer to simply have all auctions accessible and functional from a single page. Otherwise, leave it set to No, and we’ll set a post up with the auction after saving.

Finish Shipping options, then finish Other options, which includes options for Reserve price and Buy It Now.

After Updating Options, navigate to the WordPress Dashboard to create a new Post (if you want it to appear in a blog) or a new Page (if you want it to be stand alone linked from somewhere, such as the Auctions page).

Underneath the main editor for your new post, there should be a meta box for Inserting an Auction.

Creating New Auction

Select the auction to insert, and click Insert Auction. You can also click Bind Post to Auction. This is a handy function that attaches the auction to that specific post. Everywhere your auction appears (ie, notification emails, within WordPress backend, etc) will be attached to that auction, so you can edit them at once.

It also makes it easy to add many auctions at quickly. In the auction settings under WP Auctions, you’ll see that an post that has been binded to an auction will now automatically show up in the auction settings.

Congratulations – you now have an active auction on your website! That is the basic functionality to set up an auction/marketplace style website like eBay.

First Auction Up!

The loose ends that need to addressed are design and user experience.

WP Auctions has a Templates option if you are listing many versions of the same product. It has Design Settings that you can adjust to fit the design of your website. And it has optional Email Settings to customize your bidders’ experience.

Taking It Further

What’s cool about WordPress plugins is that you can extend even plugins and make them do exactly what you want them to do.

User Submissions

By default, WP Auctions also allows anyone who registers on your website as a Subscriber to create new auctions. This function replicates how eBay works and allows you to grow your own true marketplace / auction website.

Bulk Upload

If you want to scale out your listings, WP Auctions has straightforward database tables so it will work with a free uploader like Really Simple CSV. They also sell their own native Bulk Uploader.

More Resources

WP Auctions has further resources on building out your auction site here.

If you need to take a step back and learn more about WordPress, check out my Beginner’s Guide To WordPress.

Next Steps

  • Follow my WordPress Website Setup Guide to get your domain name, hosting and WordPress installed.
  • Purchase and install WP Auctions plugin for WordPress.
  • Configure initial settings and set up a test auction.
  • Launch your first auction and congratulations!
  • Continue building out and adding to your website.
  • If you want the best ways to market your website online (without the annoying fluff articles), be sure to subscribe to my newsletter here.

Read More Posts in This Topic! Filed Under: Building Websites

Beginner’s Guide To Using WordPress Series

Nate Shivar Updated February 1, 2015 By Nate Shivar

Disclosure: ShivarWeb may receive a commission when you purchase from companies mentioned on this site. All data & opinions are based on our experience as customers or consultants to customers.

Beginner's Guide To Using WordPress Series

WordPress powers millions upon millions of websites. From small personal blogs to to ecommerce sites multinational firms – it’s the choice of the people and businesses all around the world. It competes with both website builders like Squarespace & Weebly, platforms like Shopify and Content Management Systems like Joomla & Drupal…because in many ways it can do it all. It’s that versatile.

However, just like any bit of software, it has a bit of a learning curve. Once you get WordPress installed on your hosting account – here’s a straightforward beginner’s guide to using WordPress with video tutorials to help you start managing and editing your own website. It really is that easy!

  1. How To Use The WordPress Dashboard + Initial Settings
  2. How To Use WordPress Posts + Pages
  3. Introduction To Categories And Tags
  4. How To Use The WordPress Visual Editor
  5. How To Work With The WordPress Media Library
  6. How To Work With Images in WordPress
  7. Troubleshooting Image Placement In WordPress Visual Editor
  8. How To Work With Menus In WordPress
  9. How To Work With Widgets In WordPress
  10. Introduction To WordPress Themes
  11. Introduction To WordPress Plugins
  12. How To Keep WordPress Updated Trouble-free
  13. Choosing & Installing Essential WordPress Plugins

Curious about what you can do with WordPress? We’ve worked to build in-depth guides for the types of websites that you can build, developed quizzes to evaluate WordPress hosting companies with, and curated various “themes” that you can inexpensively install to get the design you want right off the shelf. Here’s what we have so far –

Site-specific Guides

Building a social network (aka “Facebook-esque”) website

Building an auction website like eBay

Building a Beauty Blog or Makeup Website

Building an online store website (eCommerce)

Site-Specific Themes

WordPress themes for farm & fishing websites

WordPress themes for agencies, businesses & companies

WordPress themes for restaurants

WordPress themes for DJs & producers

WordPress themes for schools and educational websites

WordPress themes for online stores

WordPress theme frameworks for developing websites

Read More Posts in This Topic! Filed Under: WordPress Tutorials

Profitable Guide To Free Online Shipping for Ecommerce Stores

Nate Shivar Updated June 17, 2014 By Nate Shivar

Disclosure: ShivarWeb may receive a commission when you purchase from companies mentioned on this site. All data & opinions are based on our experience as customers or consultants to customers.

Profitable Guide To Free Online Shipping for Ecommerce Stores

Marketing your website successfully doesn’t matter if your site isn’t meeting your business goals (ie, making money). Different types of sites may have different problems (ie, your leads are low quality), but there is one sure fire way to quickly kill your online store – getting less money from your customer than it takes to get the product to them.

Usually this problem comes up because of a free shipping offer – one of the most surefire marketing tactics for any online store. Hundreds of blogs, agencies, and studies show the impact of free shipping on both increasing visitors & getting them to hit the Buy! button (not to mention that it pretty much helped build ecommerce empires like Zappos! and Amazon – along with becoming a customer expectation online).

Here’s a look at the pros, cons & alternatives – along with an introduction to a new, free app to help you make the right decision for both your marketing & bottom line.

[Read more…] about Profitable Guide To Free Online Shipping for Ecommerce Stores

Read More Posts in This Topic! Filed Under: Ecommerce Platforms, Improving Websites

Free Online Tools & Resources To Improve Your Website

Nate Shivar Updated January 4, 2014 By Nate Shivar

Disclosure: ShivarWeb may receive a commission when you purchase from companies mentioned on this site. All data & opinions are based on our experience as customers or consultants to customers.

Online Tools for Websites

Even though solid, useful, free tools and software do exist online, the trouble is finding them among all the junk tools and worthless ebooks (typically, you “get what you pay for”). Here’s a list of totally free tools that I use all the time.

[Read more…] about Free Online Tools & Resources To Improve Your Website

Read More Posts in This Topic! Filed Under: Improving Websites

How To Make An Online Bookings & Appointments Website with WordPress

Nate Shivar Updated October 19, 2013 By Nate Shivar

Disclosure: ShivarWeb may receive a commission when you purchase from companies mentioned on this site. All data & opinions are based on our experience as customers or consultants to customers.

How To Make An Online Bookings & Appointments Website with WordPress

This is a  guide on how to make an online bookings & appointments website with WordPress – especially for service professionals who want to be able to book their clients  on their website…without committing  to specific software vendor beyond WordPress (which is open-source, and extensible to build whatever type of website you need). Here’s how… [Read more…] about How To Make An Online Bookings & Appointments Website with WordPress

Read More Posts in This Topic! Filed Under: WordPress Tutorials

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