You’re so close you can taste it. The design process went smashingly, the development team translated it beautifully into a working site and all the content is in place. It’s time to take your new WordPress site live!
When you’re so close to the finish line, it can be tempting to sprint the final distance, but in the web world, it’s critically important to make sure you have all your ducks in a row as you introduce your new site to the world.
The last thing you want is for your first impression to go sour because some little detail got overlooked. Instead, follow this launch day checklist to make sure that you have your bases covered, and you can debut your new online home with confidence. Continue reading
Today, I’d like to address something that comes up in conversations with clients quite a bit — the myth of simple custom design. The proliferation of “get it done quick and cheap” web builders like Squarespace and design marketplaces like Fiverr have led to a growing public assumption that high-quality custom designs and “simple” websites can be had for a pittance. This is just not the case. 
One of the reasons we love WordPress so much is the vast number of plugins it has available to extend the built-in functionality. But since there are over 40,000 plugins available in the repository, we thought it would be fun to help you sort through the pile by recommending a few of our favorites. These will be plugins we use all the time, have thoroughly tested and highly suggest using if you are looking for what they offer.
We’ve been building WordPress websites here at Solamar for a long time now, and as such, we’ve curated our own internal list of the best WordPress plugins to use for a variety of functions we need our sites to have. There’s BackupBuddy for site backups and migrations, iThemes Security to protect against intrusions, Yoast SEO for Search Engine Optimization, and so on. 
It’s a social world, and one in which it is getting harder and harder to make any sort of a splash. That’s why the “verification” badge on social media services like Twitter is so highly sought after. Having that little blue badge next to your account name marks you as official, a person or brand of interest with enough clout that Twitter itself has deemed you worthy.
Google Maps have become so powerful and so ubiquitous that they’ve almost become a default element to include in website designs, even if it’s just to display the location of a single business on a contact page. Users know how to interact with them, and they look great.
Love them or loathe them, animated GIFs have become part of the way we communicate with each other in the digital age. Though they have seen regular usage as a way to inject fun commentary into a chat or social media feed for a while now, we are also beginning to see animated GIFs used for marketing purposes as well. Email newsletters are using them to add a little life to a relatively static medium, and their use in social media has grown to include more than memes.
