Need help using WordPress? You’ve come to the right place. Schedule a call with me, and you’ll supercharge your knowledge base when we apply my 20+ years of web development experience to your situation. Consider these scenarios:

1. WordPress Hosting Help

Many of our clients come to us needing help with their WordPress web hosting. They’ve been wasting time with slow-response ticket systems and on the phone with off-shore support. It takes too much time just to get them to understand your problem. Then, once they are up to speed, they lack the expertise to actually help.

On the other hand, we specialize in website/hosting optimization, debugging issues with your plugin and theme setup, and serving as your webmaster-on-call. You want a website that’s reliable and easy to use, and we make that happen by taking care of all those backend details.

2. Elementor Training

Elementor has quickly become the premier page builder for WordPress. Featuring an industry leading drag-and-drop editing interface, building websites with Elementor can feel like painting with limitless possibilities a brushstroke away. However, despite its ease-of-use, Elementor still has a learning curve. So we’re here to provide you with a trusted Elementor resource. We’ve built over 100 websites using Elementor and the Hello Elementor theme. We can help you figure out how to build global headers and footers, setup custom post type (CPT) templates, utilize the new Loop Builder, and adopt best practices to make building your sites easier and more efficient.

3. WordPress Plugin Advice

One of the great things about working with WordPress is there are tens of thousands of plugins available to extend its features. That can also be daunting when you don’t know which one(s) to pick. Given our experience with WordPress and WordPress Plugins, we can advise you on the best plugins for your use-case. Some of our favorites include Gravity Forms for form building, Elementor/Elementor Pro for page building, Advanced Custom Fields for adding admin fields to the post editor, and iThemes Security Pro for hardening your site.

What’s more, sometimes the best WordPress Plugin Help is knowing when not to reach for the latest plugin. Instead, we always aim to build sites with the fewest possible plugins so as to reduce bloat, optimize your site, and keep your security profile low by limiting your website’s potential points for vulnerabilities.

4. Which WordPress Theme Should I Use?

We’ll save you a Zoom call and pass along our best advice right here: Our preferred theme for building WordPress websites is the Hello Elementor theme. It’s available for free via the WordPress plugin repository. Combine it with the Elementor page builder, and you’ve got a blank canvas for building virtually any website design. Check our portfolio for numerous examples of websites we’ve built using this combination.

Keep in mind, what we’re recommending here is a “blank slate”. In other words, once you activate the Hello Elementor theme, your site will have extremely minimal styling. However that’s what we love about this theme as it allows us to build out our own designs from scratch without working against the default styling of more opinionated themes. Hello Elementor sets you up with everything you need to build an Elementor site and nothing more. It’s up to you to build things out according to your sensibilities, and if that seems intimidating to you, we’re more than happy to help you get up to speed via a Zoom call.

5. Secure Site/SSL/HTTPS

Is your website served via a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate? Check it now by typing https:// before your website domain. If you can browse your site over https:// without any errors, then you should be good to go. If your browser does give you a warning, grab a call with us, and we can point you down the path to properly securing your site. Keep in mind, serving your website securely is a vital part of modern day “good website hygiene” as most browsers will show a Not Secure warning, and Google considers https:// as a search ranking factor.

6. Shopping Cart Setup

If you want to sell products on your site, you’re probably thinking you need to add “shopping cart software” or some other buzz-word for e-commerce. You’re on the right path, and we can help you get to the finish line with your e-commerce plugin configuration and payment processor selection and setup. We’re well-versed in everything from customer experience on your site all the way to ensuring credit cards get charged properly with the funds landing in your bank account.

7. Webmaster/Web Developer On Call

Has your web developer “ghosted” you? We’ve become the trusted resource of numerous clients who have come looking for someone like us whenever their original webmaster went AWOL. In other words have you been left “high and dry” with a website in need of critical updates and you’re afraid you’ll break it? Have us take a look, and we can advise you on your next steps.

We can help you sort out your website hosting versus your domain registration. We know how to take care of your website and email hosting. For example, have you ever had someone say they’re going to update your DNS for your website, and they end up knocking out your email? We know the difference between the MX(Mail eXchanger) and TXT/SPF/DKIM records for your email versus the A and CNAME records that point your domain to your website, and we know how to work with each separately so as not to cause issues with one or the other.

Need help and see yourself in any of the above scenarios? Go ahead and grab a call with us. If your situation isn’t covered above, there’s still a good chance we’ve seen it before. Failing that, I’m sure we can help you figure it out. Got questions? Feel free to comment on this post.

The post WordPress Help, 7 Common Questions appeared first on Wenmark Digital Solutions LLC.

Lately we’ve helped out several clients by converting their websites over to a WordPress + Elementor setup. One client for example was using Wix as their website platform, we took what they had and re-built it with WordPress and Elementor. Another client had a WordPress-powered site that was using WP Bakery. In both cases, the client didn’t feel comfortable editing their site. The solution was to do a re-build.

Now each client is much more confident making their own edits. What’s more, when they have ideas they can’t implement themselves, we’re able to build out new pages and features much quicker because WordPress + Elementor is a great combo for developers like us too.

Given all of the above, I’ve setup a new service offering on Fiverr for converting your website to WordPress and Elementor. It’s a clear-cut service offering that we’re finding is more-and-more in-demand. In a growing number of cases, we’re finding new clients are asking for this service by name as everyone is becoming more familiar with Elementor. In other cases, they’re coming to us looking for an easy-to-edit website. It only takes a 3 minute demo of WordPress and Elementor to show how easy editing your own site can be.

The post Convert Your Website to WordPress and Elementor appeared first on Wenmark Digital Solutions LLC.

We’ve got a client who publishes a bi-monthly print magazine. He provides us with the PDF and all the graphical assets used to produce it. Then it’s our job to take those assets and get the online version published. You can see our work at md-update.com.

Short of someone nailing an AI implementation of this process (which I’ve yet to find), our method is the most straightforward solution you will find. Just send us your stuff, and we get to work following the process we’ve worked with you to perfect. We’re optimized to grab your copy without grabbing any extraneous items that are often “sprinkled” throughout a print publication. We intelligently reproduce your articles so that the whole process is handled start-to-finish.

As far as our aforementioned client is concerned, this process has worked like clockwork for the past three years. Whatsmore, our solution is significantly cheaper than an automated solution that his publisher tried to pitch to him.

Given that we’ve got the process and the staff to pull this off, I’m writing this in case there are others like my client out there. Are you a publisher in need of an online version of your print magazine? If so, talk to us. We can get your issues published on your existing website, or if you need us to build your online zine, we can do that too. Then you can rely on us any time you’ve got a new issue that needs publishing on the web.

Schedule a call with us today to discuss your online publishing needs.

The post HowTo: Convert Your PDFs to HTML (Hint: Work With Humans) appeared first on Wenmark Digital Solutions LLC.

Fortunately, it’s easy to recover from this scenario. All you have to do is click on “Edit with Elementor” to reenable Elementor for the page. Once you do that, the Elementor styling for the page is reapplied. To see what I’m talking about, watch this video:

The post HowTo: Recover Styling on an Elementor Page appeared first on Wenmark Digital Solutions LLC.

Today I helped a client make a minor tweak to her SquareSpace website. To do so, I added a bit of custom CSS via the Advanced tab. Watch the video to see how I did it.

The post HowTo: Add Custom CSS to your SquareSpace appeared first on Wenmark Digital Solutions LLC.

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One of my colleagues and I are rebuilding a client’s Genesis Theme website using Elementor. She’s doing the initial setup while I’m coming in and batting cleanup. In part one of this series, I come in and make the following edits to the site’s footer:

• Cleanup the styling for the footer menus
• Figure out what’s causing all the footer links to turn “bold” on hover and remove that setting from the global styles in Elementor
• Setup a footer copyright with a dynamic year value
• Create a scroll-to link that scrolls the page back to the top

All that plus more fun! This one is 27 minutes of me working in Elementor, you might want to watch it at 2X speed.

The post Elementor Website Cleanup – Part 1 appeared first on Wenmark Digital Solutions LLC.

In this screencast, I show you how to edit navigation menus in a WordPress website. The site I’m demoing in the video was built using WordPress, Elementor/Elementor Pro, and the Hello Elementor theme. I show you how to:

• Edit the text that appears for your menu items.
• Set a menu item to open in a new tab.
• Show hide interface elements via the “Screen Options” tab at the top right of the WordPress admin.
• Add new items to the menu and reorder them with drag-and-drop.

About my client: You’ll note I’m doing my demo while working on the website of Healthy Connections. They aim to grow a network of church and community organizations that provide effective and accessible relationship assistance to citizens of Knoxville and surrounding counties. They believe that church and community organizations can provide research-proven relationship assistance to help couples grow healthy, stable relationships.

The post HowTo: Edit nav menus on a WordPress website appeared first on Wenmark Digital Solutions LLC.

Once you’re up and going with your website, you’ll probably be wanting to add new content from time-to-time. In this screencast, I go over a typical process for adding new posts to a blog or news section on your website.

Featured in this screencast, is one of my longtime clients Missio International. Their organization is a partnership between Romanian and American Christians in order to serve the spiritual and social needs of the Romanian people.

The post HowTo: Post a blog post on a WordPress website appeared first on Wenmark Digital Solutions LLC.

Watch and learn about:

• Using the Elementor Post Title and Post Content widgets to display the key content of your posts
• Adding additional widgets for “static” content you want to appear with every post (i.e. sidebars, sharing buttons, author boxes, etc)
• How using a post template means you build the post layout once and can then write all your posts in the default WordPress editor
• and more…

The post How a Single Post Template Works in Elementor appeared first on Wenmark Digital Solutions LLC.