1. Half-Page Graphic 

Most commonly used for landing pages these elements are pretty simple and allows you to create contrast. Play with layers and give the illusion of depth to help your main product or service photo pop. 

https://www.straightfromyard.co.uk

2. A Framed Viewpoint 

This element can help you present CTAs (call-to-actions) in fancy ways. Limit the scrolling area in a frame and create empty space at the top and left or right areas. These layouts are often seen on architecture, museum, corporate, and other formal websites. 

https://korsel.bold-themes.com/main-demo/home-5/

3. Horizontal Scrolling  

Think of this element like you are flipping through a book or magazine. This element is best if you have a portfolio of items to show off. For example, you are company sells luxury wine. You can showcase you top sellers on your home page and users can “flip” through to view your brand’s story and products. A word of caution for this element, it can be glitchy on mobile so you may have to deactivate it for phone viewing. 

https://scepterandsword.com

4. Translucent Skewed-Shape Layout 

Use an abstract shape and dim the opacity a little to partially obscure your product or service shot. It acts as a little sneak peek and gives a feeling curiosity to your website. Brands that also want to covey speed, strength, and boldness usually adopt this layout.  

http://www.themestarz.net/html/lovely/index-parallax.html#nav-home

5. Dynamic 3D Renderings

Pre-rendered video or 3D scenes as backgrounds can create a unique look to your product or service. There are free assets available on websites like Canva.com, Pixabay.com, Shutterstock.com, and Adobe.com. 

https://www.drpepper.ca/en/

6. Line Design

Lines are an underrated way to clean up you design. Strategically place lines to break up important info. This will also come in handy if your website is copy heavy and has only a few pictures. 

https://www.display.care

7. Arrow Links

Point to where you want users to go to. Where they are bold or thin, arrows are a universal symbol of direction. Place them in areas you want potential clients to interact with. They can act as a sales trail for visitor.

https://consulting.stylemixthemes.com/barcelona/

8. Marquee

Use keywords as decorative elements for momentum-scrolling websites. Brands that use short action words should incorporate this element either at the top or the bottom of your home page. This will give you website movement and encourage the user to stay on your page longer. This great if you want to gain a higher-clickthrough rate. 

https://chriscarruthers.co.uk/home

9. Chaotic Centered Hero Piece

This is when a horizontally centered product or service has used different fonts, typefaces, and misaligned images that create abstract look. Be careful with this technique. Avoid putting any important in hard-to-read layouts. This look is mostly for snappy headlines and images that do not show off the product or service directly. 

https://www.therailpark.org

10. Gravestone Images

Gravestone images refer to an image with top border-radiuses edited to make the full composition look like half circle shape or a gravestone. Perfume, Shampoo, Vitamin, and other Wellness or Beauty website adopt this layout to look cleaner and more high-end. 

https://dt-aia.myshopify.com

11.  Misaligned Card

These kinds of cards have the text floating partially outside the background creating a nice depth effect for your product or service shot. This is best used both in informal and elegant styles. Make sure the drop shadow isn’t too intense otherwise it will look dated. 

https://theartoffinance.biz

12. Add a Hamburger Menu

In lieu of a traditional navigation where you see all the page names, try a hamburger menu. It appears as 3 lines at the top right corner of your website. Mobile is becoming the first device most people will see your website in, and the hamburger menu is more mobile-friendly than traditional menus. 

https://www.atumobile.com

13. Use Bauhaus Shapes

These shapes are generally made with rectangles with maximized border-radius on 1 or 2 corners. Bright colors are also incorporated. Bauhaus design has a rich history, and more people are starting to appreciate it in web design, not just print or architecture.

https://yourleadershipbridge.com

14. Rotated Text

Vertical text for headlines is a great element to create if you want to encourage users to scroll down. Like the marquee style, avoid using for important info, but use for headlines that are easy to read or well known to your audience. 

https://avantt.displaay.net

15. Animated Cursor

This element is underutilized by most. Not only is it fun, but it can act as a call to action. Have you mouse cursor come up as a circle that says “click” will encourage more people to interact with your website. User will stay on your website longer if they something to engage with. 

https://www.lecantiche.com

Let our team create a website with 1 or more of these elements for you. Call 248.528.360

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1. Headless WordPress 

In 2021, WP Engine conducted a study that revealed that 64% of enterprise respondents already use headless technology. The benefits of a headless WordPress setup are:

• Better Performance 
• Improved Flexibility 
• Better Security  

2. No-Code WordPress Development  

No-code platforms are taking more space in the development world. With the help of visual page builders like Elementor and plugins like WooCommerce for e-commerce, WordPress allows you to have a fully functional website or shop in days and at a fraction of the cost you would spend to build it from scratch. This will also help if your company is the one maintains it after it is built. 

3. WordPress for SaaS 

SaaS products have various use cases for B2B and B2C clients, including automating tasks, streamlining business workflows, adding new functionalities, or providing an alternative to expensive custom-coded options. 

4. WordPress for E-Commerce  

According to a Statista report, WooCommerce is the second leading e-commerce platform (after Squarespace) with a 23.43% market share worldwide. The e-commerce software application market is forecast to grow to approximately $6.3 billion by 2023, and WooCommerce. Over 1,000 WooCommerce plugins are listed in the official WordPress plugins repository, and on CodeCanyon, a popular premium plugins marketplace, over 1,300 WooCommerce plugins are available to purchase. 

5. Gutenberg Enhancement 

With every WordPress version update, it got a lot of new features, and many bugs have been resolved. Gutenberg 11.9 introduced improvements to the site editor in preparation for full site editing. FSE will change how users design and develop WordPress websites using Gutenberg blocks to post content and edit the website elements like the header, footer, menus, and sidebars.

6. Performance Improvements 

Code contributors from Yoast and Google outlined the need that WordPress should have a coordinated approach toward improving performance and proposed creating a performance team. In 2202, according to Search Engine Journal, expect improvements, new features and updates related to the following key areas:

• Images
• JavaScript And CSS
• Themes/Plugin Requirements

7. Accessibility Improvements 

Make your website and its content available for all people, whatever their device, software configuration, language barriers, location, or level of ability. When a site that passes all the accessibility tests, all users have equal access to its functionality and content. This may also be a legal requirement in many territories.

Need help implementing these steps? Call 248.528.3600. 

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Always Install Updates

When vendors release updates, it is usually to fix vulnerabilities that they have discovered. The race against the clock makes it critical to regularly check for updates for your operating systems, especially if your website is built in a CMS such as WordPress. Additionally, check for updates for themes, templates, and plugins. Cybercriminals like to target free plugins and templates to plant a virus or steal sensitive user data. 

Safeguard Passwords & Use Multi-Factor Authentication

Hackers like to use a tactic called brute-forcing, where they attempt to gain access to your accounts by rapidly trying thousands of possible passwords. Create a strong password for your backend and anywhere that has important or confidential information (such as credit card numbers, client info, etc.). Password managers are great tools that encrypt and store each of your passwords, allowing you to easily access them across all your devices. They also usually notify you when you need to change a password and will help you generate a strong password to replace it. Add an extra layer of protection by using a multi-factor authentication (MFA). It will require two or more factors of authentication to access a system, this might include, passwords, PINs, facial or voice recognition, fingerprints, or phone notifications.

Use Trusted Antivirus Software

Antivirus software will protect your website against a variety of threats. They are created to proactively block, detect, and remove cyberthreats like viruses, malware, and ransomware before they can cause any harm. A comprehensive package should also include anti-spam and anti-phishing protection, a firewall, and browsing protection. There are many software packages available in the app store. If you are having trouble determining which software is compatible with your website, consider consulting a professional agency that regularly maintains websites. 

Invest in Professional Services 

Maintaining a website is a full-time job. It can be overwhelming making sure your website is running smoothly and that it well-protected, especially if you’re busy running your business. Make sure to create a budget that you can use to hire a professional web agency. Look for agencies that offer web maintenance. If your website is not built yet or you have one that is outdated, look for an agency that offers design and development services. The professionals know how to keep your website updated and safe as well as can monitor your website, so you don’t have to. This leaves you to focus on other areas of your business without stressing over your website. 

Need help improving the security of your website? Call 248.528.3600.

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1. AMP

Back in 2015 Google updated their search engine to award websites with good speed and is still in effect today. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open-source project developed by Google to instantly load content for mobile users, allowing web content to load faster on mobile devices. It transforms your website layout and strips it down to the core essentials. 

The AMP plugin also allows you to automatically generate the AMP markup while writing content. This markup is executed automatically when mobile users visit your website.

Installing AMP is important for growing your search presence.

Additional benefits of the AMP WordPress plugin include:

• Develop components that are compatible with AMP.
• Auto-generate AMP markup for your website screens. This will allow you to markup your website for AMP without changing your standard workflow.
• Take advantage of mobile redirection and AMP-AMP linking.

2. Smush 

Smush is the most popular image compression plugin in the WordPress plugin marketplace. This plugin can bulk compress images, automatically compress new images, and enable lazy loading. Smush comes with both free and paid plans. The free plan allows you to compress all the new images you upload. It can also bulk compress existing images, but there is a limit to the number of images you can compress in one go. The tool works in the background to take care of all your website’s artwork. Smush can also resize website images and look for incorrectly sized pictures.

More benefits of using Smush for your WordPress website:

• Compress images without losing quality. Smush strips away redundant data from images without hurting their quality.
• Deferred rendering of off-screen images with lazy loading.
• Bulk compress existing images on your WordPress website. You can also compress images that are not in your media library.
• Optimize as many images as you like with the free plan. You can only compress images that are below 5 MB in size.

3. WP Rocket 

WP Rocket is a premium plugin and is not available for free in the WordPress marketplace. You’ll have to purchase WP Rocket, download the plugin, and install it on your WordPress website. Once the plugin is active, you can choose from a variety of performance practices to speed up your website. This includes caching, image compression, minification, gzip compression, and more. The tool is specially designed for WordPress websites. 

Features as part of the plugin:

• Cache your website pages in no time to get an optimized load time.
• Compress website assets on your server and decompress them on the website to improve server response time.
• Cache website assets which include HTML, CSS, and JS files.
• Integrate a CDN to your website to make sure it loads fast anywhere in the world.
• Clean up redundant data in your website server like spam comments, pingbacks, and more.

4. W3 Total Cache 

With W3 Total Cache you can use the plugin to cache your website assets and reduce load time.

You can also integrate a CDN to your website using W3 Total Cache to shave off more seconds from your load time. The plugin improves your website server’s response time, enabling you to manage more visitors to your site with greater ease.

Advantages of using W3 Total Cache:

• Minification of JS, CSS and HTML files with the plugin can help you save 80% of your server bandwidth
• Support for AMP to make mobile viewing faster and easier.
• Compatible with shared, managed, and dedicated website hosts.
• Caching of minified and compressed CSS and JS files in memory, disk, or CDN.
• Caching of website assets like categories, search results, tags, comments, and more.
• Lazy loading functionality to defer loading of off-screen images.
• Security mechanisms to bring the site up to standard security levels.
• Data that details caching metrics, and the performance of other enabled features.

5. Cloudflare 

Cloudflare is the most trusted solution out there for website security and performance optimization. Once your website is connected, Cloudflare can instantly shore up your site speed with Automatical Performance Optimization (APO).

APO enables you to host your website on Cloudflare’s cutting-edge servers, allowing you to deliver fast speeds to users anywhere in the world. Even without APO, you can still get automated cache purge features for your website. Your visitors will always see the updated static content when they arrive on your website.

Additional benefits of using Cloudflare:

• Manage your CloudFlare account settings within your website’s admin panel. You can choose from options to purge cache, manage security levels, optimize images, and more.
• Support for HTTP2.
• CDN integration to ensure your website runs fast everywhere in the world.
• Best-in-class security standards with WAF rules.

6. WP Optimize 

WP Optimize is a powerful plugin that caches your website and streamlines your database. This is to make your website fast and SEO-friendly. This feature alone comes loaded with functionality like pre-loaded cache, device-responsive caching, gzip compression, and more.

Other functionalities of the plugin include database optimization and image compression. 

More reasons to use WP Optimize:

• Remove redundant data from your WordPress database like pingbacks, trackbacks, spam comments, and more.
• Defragment SQL tables on your server.
• Automatic database cleanups.
• Bulk compression of your website’s images. You can restore your compressed images to their original quality as well.
• Multi-pass lossy compression algorithm to double your compression rate without losing as much in quality.
• Advanced caching rules to choose which website assets you wish to cache.

Start building a website with these plugins today! Call 248.528.3600.

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• Major versions of WordPress get released every 152 days on the average. 
• WordPress gets the most of its downloads on Wednesdays, while Fridays are the least popular. 
• 22% of WordPress sites are running on the latest version of WordPress. 
• WordPress 5.2 has been downloaded nearly 37 million times already. 
• WordPress 5.x is used by 58.3% of all WordPress websites, while WordPress 4.x is still used by 39.2%.
• 56 – the number of official translations of WordPress. 
• WordPress 4.1 features 394,243 lines of code (96,924 of those lines are comments.). In comparison with the previous major release, 17,599 lines were added. 
• Around 21% of the whole WordPress code are comments. 

Struggling to update your WordPress site? We can help! Call 248.528.3600

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Start your WordPress website today! Call 248.528.3600

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Get started now by calling 248.528.3600

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WordPress recently released a new update and it 4.2.2 is now available.  This update is a critical security release for all previous versions.  Miller Media strongly encourages you to update your WordPress website  immediately.

The WordPress team was made aware of a cross-site scripting vulnerability, which could enable commenters to compromise a site.

Download WordPress 4.2.2 or venture over to Your Dashboard → Updates and simply click “Update Now”.  Read More about WordPress Update 4.2.2

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