Webmaster – eFriend Magazine https://efriend.in Your Technology Advisor Thu, 16 Apr 2020 13:36:01 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://efriend.in/picsy/2026/02/efriend-favicon-250x250.png Webmaster – eFriend Magazine https://efriend.in 32 32 Easily Build a WordPress Website in Minutes https://efriend.in/easily-build-a-wordpress-website-in-minutes/ Thu, 16 Apr 2020 07:23:07 +0000 https://coolefriend.com/?p=5885 The internet has made the world smaller and the distance shorter. The internet continues to transform the way we are interacting with the world, sharing and connecting information. The World Wide Web was invented in March of 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee. He also introduced the first web server, the first browser, editor HTTP and HTML. The first website was published in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee. Internet users account for 57% of the global population. On average people spend 6 hours 42 minutes each day on the internet. Now using a very low investment, one can create a web presence in the form of a website. There are over 1.5 billion websites on the world wide web today, out of which 200 million websites are currently active. So for expand your market or getting more users a web presence is essential.

Why WordPress?
WordPress is a content management system (CMS) used by small personal blogs o corporate websites. One-third of the World’s websites are powered by WordPress. WordPress is the most used website building package, followed by Joomla and Drupal. The main advantage of WordPress is it is userfriendly and simple. You can install and run a WordPress website within minutes without any technical knowledge. You can extend the WordPress features with plugins, you can also available themes for multiple options. You can get themes for making personal blogs, services offering websites, directory, portals, magazines, newspapers, and eCommerce websites. WordPress also gets enough support and help from its largest online community. You can easily update your website, plugins, and themes. WordPress is SEO friendly and responsive. So you can access a WordPress website on your mobile phone. You can easily customize your website by customizing the theme and plugin. You can easily manage the contents by yourself, you can also assign authors, editors, and administrators by assigning the roles. Moreover, WordPress is open-source software.
These are the steps for starting your WordPress website:

  • Choose a domain name
  • Find a hosting provider and choose a package
  • Install WordPress
  • Choose theme and plugins to customize your site
  • Install and update themes and plugins
  • Learn to use the dashboard, start to create posts and pages
WordPress dashboard

Choosing a domain name
The first step for building a website is to choose the right domain for your website. The first thing to do is to select a keyword that targets your area. Make the keyword memorable, easy to type. Our domain Coolefriend (CEF) is an easy to remember, unique domain name, so you can easily spot by just typing it on a search engine. Through the domain, we are intended to tell others that we are an electronic friend (efriend) who wants to share cool technology tricks, tips and ideas. The keyword plays an important role in the domain. For example, if you are going to build a website about auto, Autozone, Autoblog, Autonews will rank higher on search engines than any other keywords. You can also choose a unique brandable domain like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It is a good idea to avoid numbers and hyphens in the domain name, as it is not easily memorable. If you want to create a blog, you can read Start a blog-complete step by step guide.

Find a hosting provider and choose a package
So you have chosen a domain name for your website. Good, before rushing to register your domain (you will get a free domain-continue reading), you have to decide a hosting account to host your website. If you are registering your domain with a domain registration company and you are hosting your site in another company, you need to transfer your domain to your hosting company by paying a transferring fee. So, before going to register to, select the hosting account that you need. Commonly, there are three types of hosting accounts, Shared, VPS, and Dedicated accounts. Shared hosting is the cheapest option if you are building your first website. Shared hosting is like an apartment. You are sharing common resources like lifts, car parking, elevator with others. In shared hosting many other websites using the same server. They are using the same resources as CPU, ram, storage, bandwidth, etc. The biggest problem is with security, if anyone of the websites in the server is hacked, the intruder can access other websites in the server. There is a great chance to get overcrowded the server, which limits the storage and bandwidth. The Virtual Private Server (VPS) is similar to shared hosting, but the server is partitioned to different virtualized server environments. VPS offers a baseline of guaranteed resources. VPS is fast, secure and scalable. You can increase or decrease the server resources based on your needs. In dedicated hosting, your website is hosted on a single dedicated server. You are the only resident in your rented home, so you can enjoy the dedicated server by yourself, you can customize the server to your needs, so it is expensive. If you are going to build a personal website, a blog or a startup website a shared hosting is enough. If you are planning to build a site that requires some computing resources, more security and needs root access to configure your server a VPS server is the best. If you plan to build a large scale website, a social networking community, or a video sharing platform that requires dedicated hardware resources, then go for dedicated hosting.

Install WordPress
These days for hosting WordPress websites, a separate dedicated for WordPress hosting is available. This hosting is optimized for WordPress with load-balanced servers. Your hosting plan is automatically set up with WordPress installed and ready. It also offers daily backups. For example, Bluehost offers managed WordPress hosting plans with a free domain for one year, instant WordPress installation, automated updates and backups, unlimited bandwidth, and 24/7 WordPress expert support. Their eCommerce package includes everything you need to sell online Shopping carts, inventory management, PayPal processing, all included in that package. If you are using a managed WordPress plan, you don’t worry much about WordPress installation and setup. If you need a shared or VPS plan, select a plan first (you can upgrade the plan later), enter the account information, then enter the hosting package information (you can choose and pay for 12, 24, or 36 months) a domain name that you want. You will get free domain registration, free Let’s Encrypt SSL encryption with the package. Fill out the information pay for the package.

Choose theme and plugins to customize your site
After installing WordPress, you can log in to the WordPress dashboard by visiting the URL www.yoursitename.com/wp-login.php, where yoursitename is your domain name. Enter the username and password, you will be welcomed to the WordPress dashboard. You can install any WordPress theme on your WordPress website. You can find a huge number of free themes and plugins from the WordPress website. Most of the free themes also have a Pro version with more features. You can purchase the pro version form the respective websites. For example, if you want to start a Travel agency, you can use the Travel agency WordPress themes. If you want to run a magazine website, you can install a magazine WordPress theme. If you want to start an online education site, you can use the education pack WordPress theme and Plugins pack. You can create whatever website you want with WordPress, you can check ThemeForest to find the huge list of themes for your project. Before installing the theme check the demo available on the website to see how the theme works and check the features that you want. You can easily clone the look and feel of the demo using the demo importing function that is available with the theme. Remember, the demo importing function is good for a new website, for existing sites take enough precaution to avoid rewriting of demo content above the existing content.

Install and update themes and plugins
Install and activate a Theme
Click on Appearance, you can see Themes, Customize, Widgets, Menus and Theme editor. Click on Themes, you can see the available themes. Click on a theme to see Activate and preview button. You can preview the theme before activating it. Preview themes to select the best match for your website and its needs. If you need a new theme, click Add new in Themes. Search themes by entering a search term like magazine, shop, etc. Select the theme you want and click install. The theme installed on your WordPress website. You can see the new theme in Themes. Preview the theme, if you are satisfied, you can activate the theme.

Install and activate a Plugin
To install a theme, click plugins>Add new. Search plugins and click install. You can also install plugins by uploading a plugin. To upload plugin, Plugins>add new>Upload Plugin. Select the plugin (in compressed .zip format) using Choose File. After uploading hit the Install Now to install the plugin. If you are purchasing plugins from a third-party vendor, you can upload and install the plugin using this method. Remember, some plugins may cause some errors in your WordPress website, some plugins may not work properly as displayed on the manufacturer’s website. It is a wise idea to install the free version or lite version of the plugin first to check whether the plugin works as mentioned. If the plugins make any problem in loading your WordPress website, just remove the newly installed plugin from the WordPress plugin directory using an FTP tool and reload your site.

Learn to use the dashboard
In the WordPress dashboard, on the left side, you can see Dashboard, Posts, Media, Pages, Comments, Appearance, Plugins, Users, Tools, and Settings. All are self-explanatory, the Posts are for posting or viewing blog posts. Media is for adding and viewing media like images on your WordPress website. Pages are to create and edit pages. Comments are to view and moderate comments submitted by your readers. You can customize your theme in Appearance>Customize. You can add logo, favicon, ad banners, and can change posts and page display. The Pro version of WordPress themes offers different methods to customize your theme to meet your goal. You can add pages from Pages> Add new. You need to create a Home page and post page to display it as Home and post pages. Create Home and post pages first and publish it, then go to Settings>Reading, to view Reading settings. In Reading Settings, under Your homepage displays, choose A static page (select below), the for Home page select the Home and for post page select Posts that you created just before. Modern WordPress themes support WordPress page builders like Elementor, Siteorigin, Wpbakery, etc. You can visually create and edit your home page and other pages using these page builders. To use a page builder, just install the page builder using Plugins>Add New and search for the page builder to see the available page builders. Most Pro themes come with the premium version of the page builders.

Start to create posts and pages
To create a new post, go to Posts>Add New. Enter the title, add a description, add images and videos. After creating the post, on the right side select the category of the post (you can create categories from Posts>Categories), add tags, add a featured image to display above the post and click Publish. If you want to keep the post as a draft, click Save as a draft, if you want to preview the post-click preview. If your post is ready to publish you can publish the post. In the same way, you can create new pages on your WordPress website. If you are editing an existing post, the Publish button will be changed into Update. So you can update the existing posts any number of times. You can learn it by doing, so create posts and pages to familiarize yourself with the WordPress dashboard.

Attract visitors and monitor your traffic
You can attract visitors to your website using search engines. You can also publish posts to social networking sites with links to attract visitors from social media. You can add Google Analytics or any website analytics code to track your website traffic. Google Analytics is the best feature-rich free tool to track and analyze your website traffic. You can make money by placing advertisements, selling the ad space, selling products and services, and promoting other people’s stuff.

How to Build an online store with WordPress
As I mentioned earlier, WordPress is a feature-rich, highly customizable platform. You can create online stores using WordPress and Woocommerce. WooCommerce is a customizable, open-source eCommerce platform built on WordPress. You can install and activate Woocommece from Plugins. WooCommerce comes bundled with the ability to accept major credit cards, bank transfers, checks, and cash on delivery. You can sell physical or digital products using Woocommerce and accept payments through different methods. Bluehost , Liquidweb and others offer dedicated e-commerce hosting based on WordPress and Woocommerce. It auto-installs WordPress and Woocommerce for you with the Storefront WordPress theme. You can get a huge number of free and paid Woocommerce themes to use in your store.

There are a number of reliable hosting providers offering high quality managed WordPress hosting, shared, VPS and dedicated hosting. Hostinger, iPage, Media temple, Liquidweb, Interserver, Webhostingpad, and Namecheap are some quality hosting providers. For domain names, Namecheap domains offer low priced domains whereas Hostinger offers several low-cost values for money hosting plans.

]]> Best Email Marketing Tool for Your Next Campaign https://efriend.in/best-email-marketing-tool-for-your-next-campaign/ Tue, 31 Dec 2019 10:59:13 +0000 https://coolefriend.com/?p=5881 If you are new to email marketing, it is a type of digital marketing of sending emails to prospects and customers. You may be noticed that in your email account you may get hundreds of emails every month related to product and service promotions and various updates without requesting it. These are marketing campaigns send by some agency or an individual to get more customers to their business. Nowadays, everyone has at least one email account. We can send emails to a single person or to a group of the person using the email service. But it is not easy to send hundreds of personal emails by mentioning their name in the email content. When we address someone by using their name, they may get attracted to the message. In those email services, you may not have any idea about is the email received, opened and clicked by the end-user.

To send bulk emails, you need an email list of your targeted customers. You need an email service offering unmetered emails to anyone. A good newsletter template to create eye catchy emails to attract your customer’s attention, and finally, you need some tools to monitor the user’s activity like clicks, visits, geographic location, etc. A normal email service is not meant for marketing purposes, so it cannot offer all those features to you. You need some special service that specially designed for email marketing to speed up your marketing endeavor. Email Newsletters are the bread and butter of your email marketing campaign. You can welcome your customers to your platform, inform about an upcoming event or promotion in an attractive way. Sometimes you need a personalized bulk email service to inform your members about an event or a program. In that case, you don’t want any marketing application, you only need a mail merge tool to send bulk emails using your email service.

Customer relationship management (CRM) tools are designed to manage your interactions with current and potential customers in an easy way. You can create pipelines, pipelines are a visual representation of any type of interaction or a sale process in a series of steps.

Mail Chimp
(https://mailchimp.com/)
Let’s start with Mail chimp, an all in one marketing application. Mail chimp has a drag-and-drop builder, you can use pre-designed templates to create relevant emails. You can keep all your images and files in their content studio for always getting it from anywhere. You can automate the work, it can send the right email to the right person at the right time without doing the same work every time. You can track engagement, growth, clicks, bought, downloaded and more in real-time.

Convertkit
(Join Convertkit challenge)
If your company or your website or product has an email subscriber list, then you can convert those casual readers into subscribers. The visual automation tool allows knowing where your subscribers are from and how they are acting on your campaign. You can group subscribers with tags and segments to send targeted content newsletters based on their interests. They are offering a prize of $10,000 plus a free year of Converkit, a year of coaching with one of their account managers as part of their landing page challenge.

Optinmonster
(Join Optinmonster)
Opinmonster’s powerful drag and drop builder helps you to create highly optimized high conversion rate Optin forms. You can also start with pr-made templates. You can create multi-step yes or no forms to improve conversation and sales. It can target inactive visitors and convert them into subscribers. You can personalize campaigns based on visitors’ location. It also supports A/B testing of your ideas to increase conversation.

Get Response
(https://www.getresponse.com/)
Getresponse is a marketing software platform to create content, boost sales and traffic to your product or website. It has email marketing tools, autoresponders, landing pages and analytics to track your marketing campaign.

Sendinblue
(https://www.sendinblue.com/)
Sendinblue offers A/B testing (split test) to analyze the variation in the campaign to learn what works best for you and what doesn’t work. The A or B test is a way of test the two different variations of an email campaign to find the most successful variation of your campaign. You can start an email or SMS or social ad campaign through Sendinblue.

Constant Contact
(https://www.constantcontact.com/)
You can create professional responsive email templates with the editor of the Constant contact. You can greet new subscribers with a welcome email, automatically resend emails to non-opers, segment contacts to send the right messages with this tool. You can upload contacts from Excel, Outlook, Salesforce and from other contact lists.

There are a number of email marketing applications available on the market to build lists, send emails and connect with your target audience faster than ever before. Aweber, Drip, Mailerlite, Activecampaign are some of the popular applications. Almost all applications have a free account to start with, but the number of people in your account is limited. Up to 1000 subscribers and up to 12000 emails per month mailerlite is free, beyond that you have to pay fees based on the subscriber count. Mailchimp’s free plan has a subscriber limit of 2000 and can send 10,000 emails per month. If you are having less than 2000 subscribers and expected to send less than 10,000 emails per month, a free plan is sufficient for you. You can upgrade your plan when your subscribers grow. The A/B testing and some other features are may not be available for free users. You can also check the best email marketing software to run an email marketing application from your own server.

]]> Find out Scripts, Plugins and Theme a Website is Using https://efriend.in/find-out-scripts-plugins-and-theme-a-website-is-using/ Sun, 25 Aug 2019 17:21:28 +0000 https://coolefriend.com/?p=5223 Do you want to know the technology used to build a website? How they build their stunning website? Did they use any CMS? What Content Management System (CMS) they are using. Which themes they are using to get a fantastic visual appeal? Which plugins fire the website? As a webmaster, you need to know the best in the industry to build the best for you and for your customer. Here are some tools that can detect the technology behind any website.

WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Shopify and a big list of CMS help us to build a website without any technical effort. WordPress is the most popular and widely used CMS that powers 27% of the internet. As per Openhub’s project cost calculator, WordPress required 112 person-years to complete with an estimated cost of 6 million dollars. 39% of online web stores using WooCommerce to run their website. Here are some tools to analyse a website and find the technologies used on the website.

BuiltWith
(https://builtwith.com/)
Using BuiltWith, you can find out the technology profile a website. You will get detailed information about analytics, advertising, web hosting, scripts, operating system, web servers and content delivery networks used by a website.

Wappalyzer
(https://www.wappalyzer.com/) (Chrome Plugin)
Wappalyzer is a cross-platform utility to analyse the technologies used on websites. It can find content management systems, e-commerce platforms, web frameworks, server software and analytics tools.

whatcms
(https://whatcms.org/)
This site helps to find the CMS used by a website. A Content Management System, popularly known as CMS, is a software developed to support users to easily create and edit a website. WhatCMS uses a variety of factors to determine which CMS a website is using.

isitwp
(https://www.isitwp.com/)
Do you want to know information about a WordPress website. Then this site tells the WordPress hosting, WordPress theme, WordPress plugins used by the website.

Rescan
(https://rescan.io/)
Use Rescan to identify the technology behind a website. It neatly displays the website’s IP address, hosting provider, Geolocation and technologies used.

There are some other sites like Scanwp, Wpdetector and Themesinfo offers detailed information about the scripts, themes and plugins used by a website.

Wondering how these websites get information about a website. In the case of a CMS, it includes a meta tag within the HTML of each page. The HTTP headers, including cookies, also used to identify a CMS. Some content management systems also offer web hosting. By analysing the domain this tools can identify the technologies behind a website. It can also tell what technologies and scripts are the most popular, how many websites using the technologies and the popularity of the technologies over time.

]]> Easily Create a WordPress Website in Minutes https://efriend.in/easily-create-a-wordpress-website-in-minutes/ Sun, 18 Aug 2019 16:06:47 +0000 https://coolefriend.com/?p=5212 Nowadays, it is easy to create a website without learning to code in any programming language. The arrival of content management systems (CMS) has changed the way of making websites. In those old days, a developer needs to code in HTML to create websites. As it requires coding and other technical skills, the common man cannot design and host a website himself. He needs to depend on an expert to design and host the website.

The content management system offers flexibility in designing different type of websites without any experts assistance. I designed and hosted my websites myself with the help of online tutorials and learned almost all by learning by doing. You can create the website yourself by following the step by step instructions.

Choose your domain name
The first thing to do to start a website is getting a domain name to identify your website on the internet. This is like giving a name to a person or a shop to identify it from the crowd. Your domain name is your company or shop’s identity on the web, make sure that it fits your topic, and also easy to remember and easy to pronounce. Keep it short, easy to type, related to the topic or subject, and memorable. Avoid numbers and hyphens and choose an appropriate name extension like .com, .net, .org or country-specific like .us, .in, etc. Try to get .com extension if it is available, 43% of domains on the net have .com extension and most familiar among netizens. If you have a domain registered with you, you can transfer it to the current web hosting provider.

Set up a Hosting Account
Next, decide the hosting package that you want to purchase to host your site. You don’t want to buy a top plan if you are an absolute beginner, start with a basic plan, you can upgrade the plan to premium without losing your data. If you are hosting your first website, get a basic plan, you can add some feature add-ons with your plan at the time of purchase or you can add it later. The domain privacy protection protects your personal information that you are giving for registering a domain. Your phone number, email address and contact address will be protected from the prying eyes. Search engine promotion and SSL certificate can be purchased later if you need it. If you are hosting a shopping website a secure connection to the website is essential, buying an SSL certificate is the right choice for shopping websites or other website receiving fund or money online.

Install WordPress
If you host your website in Bluehost, WordPress will be automatically installed for you by the WebHost. You need to click, Login to logging your website and need to choose a theme for your website. If you are using shared hosting or a VPS hosting, you need to install the WordPress by yourself. If the control panel offers Softaculous support, you can install WordPress using Softaculous. Softaculous is a script library that automates the installation of web applications to a website easily.

Choose WordPress theme and Plugins
You can choose the WordPress theme from Appearance from the WordPress dashboard as seen in the below picture. You can see the available themes, press activates to install and activate the theme. You can install plugins from the dashboard Plugins.

Learn to use the WordPress dashboard
Go through the WordPress dashboard to familiar with the interface. Click the dashboard to go back to the WordPress dashboard. Click, Posts, media, pages, comments to see the posts, pages, published pictures and comments on your website.

Customize and Optimize WordPress installation
You can customize your WordPress website by adding the right theme to your installation. If you need a shopping website look for a shopping theme. So you can build a web store without any difficulty. Do you want to sell something through your site, you can install Woocommerce or easy digital download plugins to set up a cart on your website. You can visit the WordPress website to find the best themes and plugins for your site based on the description and screenshots.

In WordPress, posts are meant to hold time-based content, the posts can be sorted into categories and tags. In Pages, you can write evergreen content or information where the publishing time isn’t very relevant like an About page or Contact page.

If you are hosting your website on Bluehost, they have an affordable WordPress hosting plan that automatically installs and updates WordPress. It also includes a free domain name for one year and free SSL certificate. Start a Bluehost WordPress hosting account to create and manage all your websites from one account panel.

]]> Host Your Website for Free https://efriend.in/host-your-website-for-free/ Mon, 12 Aug 2019 18:07:58 +0000 https://coolefriend.com/?p=5092 Do you want to create your own website and don’t have any money for buying a hosting account? If you are a student, sometimes you need a website for your school and University projects. Free web hosting is an amazing opportunity to start and learn to code a website. Free hosting supports the most popular programming languages like PHP, MySQL, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. If you want to start your own website at your own domain or outgrow the limits of free web hosting, you can upgrade your free hosting account to premium web hosting without losing your data. Most hosting providers offer seamless transfer, 24/7 live support, more pro resources, and additional features in their premium plan.

Here are some free Webhosting providers you can consider, begin with, your free website.

000Webhost
(https://www.000webhost.com/)
000webhost offers zero cost website hosting with PHP, MySQL, cPanel without advertisements. All the 000webhost accounts are activated instantly and you can start working on your project as soon as you register. You can create a WordPress blog or you can create a simple HTML website easily. They have a custom control panel with all the essential tools in a single place. You can install WordPress in one-click, it also offers free domain parking.

x10hosting
(https://x10hosting.com/)
You can start your hosting free of charge with the popular cPanel control panel. You will get FTP, e-mail, and MySQL, and other features with this account. The yare also offering an unmetered bandwidth and disk space, if you want to expand your hosting account, they offer premium hosting with more features. In actual practice, the unmetered bandwidth and disk space have some limit, when you reached their target, they will inform that the unmetered limit is over. But for a startup person, this free account is enough, to begin with.

FreeHosting
(https://www.freehosting.com/)
free hosting offers a full range of tools and resources you need for creating all type of websites. The free hosting is valid for the entire lifetime of your domain. The free hosting is suitable for lightweight websites like WordPress blog, Internet forum, or website built with the inbuilt Site Builder. The free account can serve nearly 30000 daily visitors of PHP-based website, or virtually unlimited visitors of HTML website. They do not provide hosting for free subdomains (eg: site.maindomain.tld). You need to buy a registered domain to host with them. The scripts mailing functionality that can integrate with scripts is disabled by default on free accounts.

5GBFree
(https://www.5gbfree.com/)
5GBfree is free hosting provider to host your site free and without handing over any payment information.

Infinityfree
(https://infinityfree.net/)
Infinityfree offers free web hosting without forced advertisements. The Softaculous automatic script installer allows installing more than 400 scripts, applications and CMS scripts, like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, MyBB or PrestaShop, with a few clicks.

In my opinion, free Webhosting account is the right option for beginners to learn about web hosting and experimenting with different scripts, content management system and forums. Some hosting providers offer free hosting with a forced advertisement, some others not. Anyways, almost all free hosting providers have their own premium hosting service with tons of features. Normally the user begins with a free hosting account will naturally choose their premium account as their site grows. Most provide offers seamless up-gradation to a premium account, so the user can easily transfer their contents to a premium account without much technical knowledge.

Infinityfree
(https://infinityfree.net/)
Infinityfree offers free web hosting without forced advertisements. The Softaculous automatic script installer allows installing more than 400 scripts, applications and CMS scripts, like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, MyBB or PrestaShop, with a few clicks.

To my opinion, free Webhosting account is the right option for beginners to learn about web hosting and experimenting with different scripts, content management system and forums. Some hosting providers offer free hosting with a forced advertisement, some others not. Anyways, almost all free hosting providers have their own premium hosting service with tons of features. Normally the user begins with a free hosting account will naturally choose their premium account as their site grows. Most provide offers seamless up-gradation to a premium account, so the user can easily transfer their contents to a premium account without much technical knowledge.

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