Tutorials | Web Training Wheels

How To Add A Top Bar Mailchimp Opt-In

A top bar email sign up is a nice way to boost your opt-ins without being overly obnoxious. Especially with the current trend toward one column blogs, without a sidebar, it’s a great solution for making an opt-in prominent without being an eyesore. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

I wanted to add a top bar email opt in to a site and was prepared to have to research and test a few plugins, maybe fiddle with some styles and generally sink a little bit of time into the whole endeavour.

However I was able to get the job done in less than 15 minutes thanks to a couple of wondrous plugins.

Code Snippets To Customize Jetpack

Automattic’s Jetpack plugin has come a long way! It’s been much-maligned in the past for being bloated and slow and for that reason many developers wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot keyboard. These days it’s much better – it’s more truly modularized to give you more control over exactly what’s activated. From the code side of things, developers will be pleasantly surprised to discover that it has been sprinkled with lots of actions and filters. So, while Jetpack is still generally marketed to entry-level end users, there are actually some nice Easter eggs for developers who want to customize things a little bit for their clients.

How To Work on Your WordPress Site Without Going Live

So, you want to make some changes to your WordPress site without anyone else seeing?
Perhaps it’s a new site you’re getting ready to launch, or maybe you’re giving a facelift to an existing site. How can you work on your WordPress site without publishing the changes for the world to see?

You have a few options depending on your specific situation.

Use a “Coming Soon” style plugin

One approach is to put up a temporary splash page or landing page which displays a “coming soon” or “maintenance mode” style message. This can be done easily with a plugin; the one I’d recommend is Coming Soon by SeedProd. Any normal visitor who tries to access your site will see the custom message you create and nothing else. You, as the administrator, will be able to see the site as normal while logged in. The Coming Soon plugin gives you ample control over the splash page, where you can add text, images, a logo, background image etc.

Audience: Beginners, Consultants, Intermediate
Tutorials
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From WordPress Beginner → Intermediate

What’s the difference between a WordPress beginner, and an intermediate WordPress user?

If you’ve mastered the dashboard, are great at working with themes and plugins, what’s next? How do you progress to the next step, without necessarily become a code-slinging developer?

Definitions are obviously arbitrary, but for me, an intermediate WordPress user is someone who has mastered the dashboard, can find their way around any theme pretty quickly, and who isn’t afraid to get their hands dirty behind the scenes. That might not be creating custom themes or plugins from scratch, but it likely involves customizing sites with copy/paste code snippets, tweaking CSS, migrating sites, using FTP, and generally understanding the ‘behind the scenes’ of a WordPress site. They are also familiar with WordPress best practices, such as safe ways to modify themes etc. This isn’t someone who is going to hack your site to pieces, but someone who understands the right way to do things, keeping a site future-proofed, update-able and easy for the owner to manage.

This is the kind of stuff that makes some folks shudder with horror, but in reality if you can grasp some of this stuff, it’ll give you so much more confidence. If you’re working with clients, I’d consider it not only a requirement, but your responsibility as a WordPress consultant.

So how do you get to the Intermediate stage, where to start?

If you are like a lot of users, you might be forced into it when something goes wrong on your site. Most of the cool stuff I’ve learned in WordPress, I’ve generally learned by things breaking ? It’s initiation by fire, but it forces you out of your comfort zone. And, let’s face it, there’s very little you can learn in life by staying exactly how and where you are.

Maintaining Your WordPress Site

Launching your WordPress site is just the beginning of its life on the web. You’ve conceived and birthed your baby… but now you’re in charge of feeding and protecting it.

Owning a website is a responsibility.

There’s a lot to consider, more than most people realize when they are just starting out. Neglecting your site means it could get hacked, suffer from broken links, or an unplanned update breaking your contact form. Any of which could result in lost search engine rankings, decreased traffic and/or lost leads.

Here are some of the main tasks you’ll have to do on a regular basis to keep your site in excellent health.

How To Set Up a Free Download with Email Capture in your WooCommerce Shop

I’ve had some clients in the past who wanted to set up a free download in their WooCommerce store, as an email list building strategy.

In reality it can be a little cumbersome to do a free download in exchange for an email address within a store context because it takes several more clicks on the part of the user, than it would for a typical opt-in form. The steps I provide here will significantly streamline the process. I wouldn’t recommend it as your only opt-in process, but if you really want/need to use your WooCommerce store for this, the method below will certainly ease the pain points.