Tutorials

As part of our on-going foundational tutorials, we'll be explaining how to manually get out of WordPress' maintenance mode in the event that your site gets stuck in it. You may be wondering what it is and why it happens. Well anytime you update your themes or plugins, WordPress' maintenance mode kicks in, displaying a message that your site is briefly unavailable. Usually the updates only take a few seconds and are too brief to even notice.

But sometimes the process gets interrupted midway. The hiccup can come from server connection errors, or perhaps a browser or page was accidentally closed during the updating process. Whatever the case, there is usually an easy fix for it, and we have 2 possible solutions for you to get rid of that pesky message fast.

Welcome back to our tutorial series. In this edition, we'll be sharing how to save and recover specific parts or entire layouts of a page. If you've ever spent loads of time working on a page, only for an accident to change it in a way you're not happy with, you'll know that retrieving an old layout can be a huge time saver!

Themify offers a free standalone page builder for use on any third-party WordPress theme, so we'll be using the Themify Builder for this. The Builder relies on its intuitive drag-and-drop functionality, and has a revision feature, allowing you to recover previous versions of a page layout you've been working on.

You have two options of retrieving old layouts: either recover a full layout or only a specific section. Recovering a specific section of a layout is useful if you have created a great design but only want to use a part of it for another page.

In this week's tutorial series, we'll be discussing staging sites. Every time you wish to change your WordPress website, doing it without a staging site is pretty much a gamble. You would never want a visitor to see your site while it's broken, or while you're implenting and testing out a new plugin. That's pretty much the equivalent of being caught with your pants around your ankles! In any case, having a staging site would be great for everyone.

You may be asking, what exactly is a staging site? Well it's an exact duplicate of your live website but it isn't available for the public to see, and any changes you make have no effect on your live site.

The Benefits of a Staging Site

• Test out new features and updates with zero risk
• The developers can work on bug fixes while the live site is operational
• Reduces the downtime your customers may experience
• Test out WordPress, theme and plugin updates before using them on the live website
More

Stock photos add intrigue and interest to your web content and your marketing needs without the added cost of outsourcing photographers. Free stock photos can get a bad rap for being anywhere from cheesy to zany. However, the number of free AND beautiful stock photography sites are growing in number.

So, we’ve done the research and compiled a list of the best and most beautiful free stock photo sites for you all. We’ve crossed out anything that heavily advertised paid stock photos alternatives, and also whittled our choices based on our user experience (handy search features, scrolling, user interface, etc.).

Get one step closer to creating a more professional freelance, business, food, eCommerce, lifestyle, and travel website today.

1. Unsplash

Looking for consistency in photo aesthetic and style? Unsplash boasts beautifully edited images with a stock of over 300,000 high-resolution photos.

In this week's tutorial series, we'll be discussing Live Chats. Online live chatting has been growing in popularity for many website owners. Perhaps a customer visits your site for something specific or maybe they're just browsing. Whatever the reason, you don't want to lose the opportunity to close a sale. Live chat can help you achieve just that by enhancing their shopping experience. Add a live chat feature to your WordPress site in the most easy and affordable way today.

There are quite a few live chat services available, but for this tutorial we'll be using the LiveChat Plugin. It can be hard to find because of the name's popularity so we provided a link to make it easier to find.

Installing LiveChat

Right off the bat you'll need to install this plugin, which you can achieve via the WordPress admin panel. Once the plugin is installed and activated, you will be able to see the LiveChat menu option in the WordPress admin panel. This will allow you to begin the setup.

Today on our tutorial series, we'll be showing you how to migrate a WordPress site from a localhost to a live server. If you haven't already installed WordPress locally, read our "Installing WordPress on Local Computer (localhost) for PC" tutorial for more.

Having a WordPress server on your computer provides a great option to test out a theme or plugin in a safe environment before adding it to a live server. Many developers actually use this method to work with a new WordPress project because it allows them to manipulate and change the site safely.

It may seem more efficient to work on the live website but with a local server there is no downtime for the website, so the business can remain up and running as you implement all the changes you'd like. Also, it helps on the backend that your client would not see the changes being made and get concerned about the progression of the website's development before you're even finished.