plugins Archives - Michael Sunarlim

Ready-to-use MailChimp PHP integration scripts

Michael — Tue, 06 Jan 2015 08:00:33 +0000

I have shared a simple tutorial to integrate your web page with MailChimp subscription API. It is intended to give the most basic direction and then you can expand the design and functionalities to your preference. Some of you however might prefer to use a more “plug and play” approach. Therefore I decided to list a number of (paid) scripts that would allow you to add good looking MailChimp PHP integration with minimal time required. These are not free, but definitely worth to save hours of your productive time.

DooMailChimp Modal Subscribe

Let’s start with the most simple but very effective approach. DooMailChimp allows you to add a simple button or link which when clicked will trigger a form modal box that connects to MailChimp upon submission.

MailChimp Subscribe Form

Instead of using modal box, this script can be embedded using iframe so it stays on your web page. A good idea if you really want to draw more attention from your site’s visitors. The cool thing is they can sign up using Facebook, Hotmail, Google, LinkedIn aside from entering their email address manually.

Contact Form Generator

If you need more than a simple subscribe form but a complete contact form instead, this is a great form generator to make it a snap. With complete MailChimp and Aweber integration, you can create multiple forms on multiple projects in a breeze. You would still need to play with the styles though to really get the look that you prefer.

Layered Popups

Another way, and probably the most effective, to collect your visitors’ email addresses is by incorporating automatic popup. This script will do that for you with integration with almost every popular email service such as MailChimp, GetResponse, iContact, Campaign Monitor, AWeber, Mad Mimi, Benchmark, ActiveCampaign, Interspire and Sendy.

Remember, getting new subscribers is only the first step. It is more important to actually send them engaging emails and make them happy with their decision to sign up in the first place.

The post Ready-to-use MailChimp PHP integration scripts appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

WordPress Plugins to Increase Your Blog SEO

Michael — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 11:28:57 +0000

Out of the box, WordPress is already great in terms of SEO. Set up your blog, use a well-built theme, consistently publish new posts, then you are very likely to see traffic to your site. Taking the last word from Search Engine Optimization, there is no end result to it really. You can keep on experimenting and adding new functionalities to increase your search visibility.

There are tons of WordPress plugins out there and for different purposes. Most are designed to add new features or integrations with other services, some to make it looks nicer, and so on. Below I am going to list a number of plugins that will help to increase your SEO score.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

What does it do?
A lot. This is the top plugin in the category, not only to improve your blog’s SEO, but also to expand your understanding about SEO. Its one of the most important features is that you will be able to set different meta title and description which will be displayed on the search engine results. It also helps you in reviewing the content of you post with a targeted keyword or keyphrase.

Why does it matter?
Basic SEO practices encourage you to optimize your meta information to help search engines to display a more relevant preview of the page they are crawling. That aside, if you follow all other tools available from this great plugin, you are already improving your blog SEO a few levels.

Go to WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin Page

W3 Total Cache

What does it do?
It helps improving your blog performance through many methods without actually having you to move to a bigger hosting. At its heart is the caching tools that will reduce the time and resources to generate your web pages.

Why does it matter?
Search engines love sites that load fast. Reducing your page load will certainly increase your SEO score.

Go to W3 Total Cache Plugin Page

Akismet

What does it do?
Coming from the same company who brought us WordPress itself, Akismet is a web service that checks comments made on your blog for spam.

Why does it matter?
The biggest reason people or bots are spamming on people’s blogs to get backlinks to their sites, which mostly are shady. Getting spam comments on your blog means having backlinks to questionable websites and URLs, which search engines do not like. By freeing your blog, or at least reducing the number of spam comments, your blog will look more legitimate.

Go to Akismet Plugin Page

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)

What does it do?
As the name says, this plugin allows WordPress to automatically generate related posts to the one your visitors are reading. There are lots of similar plugins of course, but YARPP is most of the most popular.

Why does it matter?
Placing internal links to other posts helps search engines to index other pages on your blog and a suggested SEO practice.

Go to Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) Plugin Page

Google XML Sitemaps

What does it do?
It can automatically generate XML sitemap of your blog. It offers quite extensive settings so you can select categories to be excluded, post types and so on. Note that WordPress SEO by Yoast has this feature built-in and just as good, but in case for some reason you do not want to install that, then this one is a must.

Why does it matter?
XML sitemap is the ‘map’ for search engines to crawl the information your blog. Have it constantly updated, then you will be sure to have all your pages and posts indexed.

Go to Google XML Sitemaps Plugin Page

There are probably still dozens of other plugins that can push your SEO quality and I only share ones I use and can recommend. Feel free to share your favorites by posting your comments below.

The post WordPress Plugins to Increase Your Blog SEO appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

jQuery Cycle Pager Style as Dots with CSS

Michael — Tue, 07 May 2013 02:30:53 +0000

jQuery Cycle is a great plugin to create image slides on your website. Out-of-the-box, it is so simple to use but you can explore the options extensively to get the functions and effect that you expected.

One of the best feature is the ‘pager’ option that will create a pagination of your slideshow. By default, the function will look up for a container with ID value of ‘pager’ and generate this code:
[syntax_prettify linenums=””]

[/syntax_prettify]

Without any style, the pager will be shown simply as “123” on the front-end. You can of course stylize it any way you like it, I used to fancy the background-image replacement technique, but I want to share the CSS codes that will display it as dots or bullets. Since this is pure CSS, you can easily change the colors or size quickly and easily.
[syntax_prettify linenums=””]
#pager {
/* you can add positioning properties here if needed */
width: 75px; /* change as required */
padding: 0;
height: 14px;
z-index: 999;
}

#pager a {
display: block;
float: left;
width: 10px;
height: 10px;
text-indent: -999em;
background: #fff;
border-radius: 10px; /* must be the same as width and height */
-moz-border-radius: 10px;
-webkit-border-radius: 10px;
box-shadow: 0 0 1px 1px #707173; /* border color */
margin-right: 10px;
}

#pager a {
background: #c0c0c0; /* optional: color when hovered */
}

#pager a.activeSlide {
background: #707173; /* color when active */
}
[/syntax_prettify]

Quick preview of how it will look like:

There you go. Simple pager for a great slideshow plugin.

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