What is WordPress and why do so many use it?

You may have heard of WordPress as a blogging tool or website since its been around for over a decade and used by millions of people, but since its introduction in 2003 it has blossomed into possibly the most powerful, user-friendly and customizable website platform available today! WordPress is used by countless small businesses and personal users, as well as Fortune 500 companies and celebrities.

WordPress allows us to build your entire website online in a web browser, like Firefox or Google Chrome. This means that you can easily access your website from any computer, smart phone or tablet in the world and make changes & updates that take effect instantly! We’ve taught even the most novice computer users how to maintain and update their own website without having to call or pay anyone.
Wordpress also handles pretty much every job a user might need, with the aid of thousands of free and inexpensive plugins! You can have beautiful animated banners, image/video/music galleries, blogs, custom forms, search functionality and fully secure e-commerce! Literally anything you’d want your website to do, WordPress has a solution! It’s code is “open-source”, which means any programmer in the world can customize and create new code and plugins and offer them to the public for free. Combine this with secure website hosting, and you’ll have the ability to safely and securely store & share endless data/content with your viewers and sell your products & services with no limitations!
The final thing to consider is price, and it’s hard to beat the saving power of WordPress! Because of the incredible flexibility and inherit beauty of standard WordPress Themes and plugins, it’s possible to create a stunning and functional website in a fraction of the time and cost it used to. There is very little need to write raw code or even manipulate code at all, since much of it is pre-written into the themes and plugins. This allows designers to focus more on the aesthetics and details of the website, to make sure it looks pleasant and the content is laid out in the most intelligent way possible. As long as you have all of your content ready to go (text,images,logo,etc.), a nice WordPress website can usually be created in a matter of days or a week, not weeks or months!

If you have any other questions about WordPress or building a new website, please feel free to contact Brainy Beaver at anytime. We’re always happy to offer advice and share useful information we’ve gathered over the years

The difference between “domain name registration” and “web hosting”

These are two terms that are commonly used in discussions about owning a website or starting a new one.
Simply put, your “Domain Name” is the physical address, or URL of your website. For example, www.yourcompany.com. Ideally this would contain the exact name of your company, but many people choose clever or varied domain names depending on availability or marketing slogans. Since every domain name is 100% unique and only one person on earth at a time can own a domain name, many of the popular and obvious name have already been registered. In this case, try to choose a name that most closely resembles your business name or one that is associated with a company slogan or marketing campaign.

“Web Hosting” is the physical space on the internet where your website and files are stored. Your Domain Name is linked to your hosting provider, so without hosting your website cannot be viewed by anyone online! Think of your Domain Name as a giant sign with your company name on it, and the hosting is the actual store below it that holds all of your products and information for your visitors!

It’s also good to know that standard domain names typically cost only $15 per year to own, and web hosting costs as little as $5 per month but can increase depending on what features and security options you choose. Feel free to check out this article on Web Hosting to explore your hosting options!

The difference between “domain name registration” & “web hosting”

“Domain Names” and “Web Hosting” are two terms commonly used in discussions about creating a new website.

A “Domain Name” is the name of your website. It often ends with “.com”, and it’s what you’d type into an internet browser to navigate to your website (for example, www.yourcompany.com). A domain name may also be referred to as an “Address”, “Web Address”, or “URL”. Read more

Instantly discover the perfect color schemes & combinations

Discover the Perfect Color Schemes & Combinations for your painting or design project, with Coolors.co.

Coolors is a beautiful and easy to use website that performs one amazing function with the click of a button. You choose a starting color, or group of colors, and every time you click the spacebar it will generate new colors that match well with your starting color!

You can even control certain details like the shade, hue, saturation and brightness, allowing you to generate countless color combos for you to choose from. There do exist other free website with color generators, but we at Brainy Beaver have found Coolors.co to be the most fun and visually pleasing to use.
.
Visit www.coolors.co today, view the brief tutorial and start generating!

Compress Large Images To Send Them Easier & Make Your Website Load Faster

Image compression is an often overlooked task, but it’s an easy and effective way to reduce file size, and keep websites running smoothly.

This website allows you to upload any image in PNG or JPEG format, and it will instantly compress them down to a fraction of their original size. This is an incredibly powerful tool that can be used on their website, or installs as WordPress plugin directly on your site.

“TinyPNG uses smart lossy compression techniques to reduce the file size of your PNG files. By selectively decreasing the number of colors in the image, fewer bytes are required to store the data. The effect is nearly invisible but it makes a very large difference in file size!”

Why is this so awesome? The next time you need e-mail or upload an image(s) to someone, and you get a “file size is too large” error, you’ll be glad to have TinyPNG! As website developers, we use TinyPNG constantly to decrease the size of images to make websites load faster and improve SEO.

The best part of this tool is that the difference in quality / sharpness in the images is negligible or non-existent, so using it is a no-brainer! Use it to conserve storage space, send images faster and help your website load quicker.

Also, check out the brand new service they offer at tinypng.com/analyzer that actually analyzes your website and lets you know which images need to be optimized! This makes the process of speeding up your site even easier and faster. Thanks to Tinypng.com for all their hard work and useful services!

Identify The Dominant Pantone Colors In Your Image And Match Them With The Perfect Palette

Instantly Identify the dominant Pantone colors in your image and match them with the Perfect Palette at www.impalette.com.

Impalette.com is a useful tool that allows you to identify the most dominant Pantone colors in any image. Just upload any image, and the site will scan and identify the dominant colors in your image.

And to make it even more useful, it will also show you related colors that would match well with them! We’re not exactly sure what you’ll need this site for, but we know when you do you’ll be glad to have it 😉

TOP 5: Help Google & Bing find your website with easy SEO!

So…you’ve got your awesome new website to show the world what you have to offer…but how does your audience actually find your website among the literally millions of other websites on the World Wide Web!?

The answer is: SEO or Search Engine Optimization. But what is SEO? In short, SEO is a collection of methods used to make your website more attractive to the search engine “crawlers” that decide what websites go to the top of a search engine results page!
-please visit www.brainybeaver.com/intro-to-seo to read our full article on SEO and its import role in your business-
So, if you want to be on the first page of Google, Bing or Yahoo when someone searches for info relevant to your website, start learning some of the simple, but numerous do’s and don’ts of SEO…here’s our TOP 5 ways to help improve your websites placement online!
1) Feed the Google monster lots of keywords! 
Search engines look for relevant keywords everywhere it can, even in places that your visitors can’t see! For example, when you upload an image or video to your page, make sure it’s labeled and named correctly first. If you are a pizzeria and want people to find your restaurant when they type in “thin crust pizza in New York City”, make sure the images you uploaded from your camera/phone are titled in a smart way, like “fresh-thin-crust-pizza-extra-cheese” instead of “IMG000243″…even though visitors won’t see the title of the image on your server, automated search engine crawlers DO see it, and even they know that no one is searching the Internet for anything called “IMG000243” 😉
WordPress also makes it very easy to create the “alt tags” and “description” for your images, which add great SEO! Most people don’t think to type a sentence or two description for every image they upload online, that most people won’t even read, but it’s a perfect place to add several keywords for Google to find and give you credit for.
2) KEEP FEEDING THE MONSTER! But don’t let him see you…
Make sure your website has relevant keywords in your pages as often as possible, but make sure not to over do it and look obvious…web crawlers are super smart and can recognize if you’re simply repeating the same keywords over and over again or placing them near other content that is not relevant! Creating new and relevant content on your website keeps visitors coming back and shows search engines you are worthy of high page rankings. A clever and common way to create new content without altering the rest of your site is to keep and write in a blog!
Setting up a blog page on your WordPress website is super easy and takes only minutes to setup and learn to use, and gives you a platform on which to talk about possibly limitless topics that are closely or even loosely relevant to your organization. If you’re that pizzeria in New York City and want to take advantage of an event in your area to draw customers to your business AND drive new traffic to your website, simply make a blog post called “New York City & Gino’s Pizzeria get ready for the Spectacular Spider-Man” and write a couple of sentences and mention that anyone who comes to the restaurant in costume on that night will get a free slice of pizza! Now, there’s a chance that people online searching for Spider-man movie tickets in NYC might also see your website because you’ve hit 2 out of 3 keywords and Google happened to place you near the top of their search! So, with one simple blog post. you’ve added some sweet new keywords permanently to your website to help increase traffic, and maybe even generated some actual new physical customers with your mini marketing campaign!
*BRAINY BEAVER BONUS TIP!* If you decide to start a simple blog to help increase traffic to your site, you may as well sign up for some free social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter & Instagram, and publish that same blog post on as many of them as you can! Social Media is the most popular and trendy way to share information and explore new places, and with amazing apps like Hootsuite you can post to ALL of your social media apps & your website with a single click! Feel free to read our full article on the basics of Social Media Marketing…www.brainybeaver.com/intro-to-social-media-marketing
3) Make your text Google-friendly.
Another common method is to make sure any links on your page are written out and not shortened, because search engines highly value hyperlink text! For example, never use the shortened “CLICK HERE” term with the link attached to it! Rather, type it out completely, perhaps as “please visit www.yoursite.com/coupons“. It may be tempting to use the more concise shortcut link but it won’t help your SEO one bit. This same rule also applies to the permalinks, or actual URL titles of your pages. Trying not to have any random characters (?,!,#,@, etc.) or nonsensical words in the names of your pages. They should be simple and obvious, such as “www.yoursite.com/about-us” or “www.yoursite.com/contact“.
4) Declare your Presence and ask to be Ranked.
Submit your sitemap to Google & Bing.
Your website’s sitemap is a page that has an index list of all the pages and sub-pages on your website. By submitting this page to the major search engines it declares officially that you want to be recognized and ranked! If you need help creating your sitemap or submitting it to the search engines, just contact Brainy Beaver and we’ll help you get the job done!
5) Show Google you’ll be around for years to come.
Register your Domain name for longer than one year. One of the new parameters that Google searches for is how long a website’s domain name is registered for. This is because Google wants to put at the top of its pages not only the most relevant websites, but the ones that will be reliable and available for longer periods of time! If you Google sees that your website is registered for five years or more, it feels more secure that your site will be up and available for its users in the future…and since most domain names cost only $15/year it’s a small, but effective investment!