Plugin Highlight: Smush You're Reading: Plugin Highlight: Smush In Resources & WordPress Contact us Subscribe Smush for WordPress is a powerful plugin! We install Smush for WordPress on all our sites. This powerful plugin provides image compression, lazy loading, and so much more! Hannah Raeside Office Manager, Pod Creative Free or paid version? Smush is a free plugin that provides image optimization, and so much more. While they do have premium upgrades available in our opinion the free plugin is the way to go! Smush has been benchmarked and tested number one for speed and quality. It is also the award-winning, back-to-back proven crowd favorite image optimization & image compression plugin for WordPress. What does it do? The single, most important function Smush provides is increased website load speed. By optimizing and compressing your photos (without sacrificing the quality of the photos!) smush allows your website to load faster while maintaining the high-quality photos on your site! Large photos are a drain on web resources and can even cause pages to not load or produce time out errors. Faster! Slow-loading websites are frustrating for everyone! The average load speed of a website is expected to be under 5 seconds nowadays. Smush is one of the plugins we use to speed up our sites. Want to know more? Check out this post! Lazy Loading and Page Speed Smush also enables the ability to lazy load your images. Normally when a user opens a webpage, the entire page’s contents are downloaded and rendered in a single go. While this allows the browser to cache the web page, there’s no guarantee that the user...
Mailchimp for Beginners: Adding Contacts You're Reading: Mailchimp for Beginners: Adding Contacts In Resources Contact us Subscribe Let's learn how to import contacts into Mailchimp! Mailchimp is a fantastic marketing tool for any sized business or non-profit and can help you extend your customer reach. Collecting emails from customers, clients, and others is a great way to keep in contact and update people on what your business is doing! Hannah Raeside Office Manager, Pod Creative Adding contacts: There are a few ways you can add contacts to your Mailchimp account. You can add a single contact, you can import a sheet into Mailchimp with all the contact information, or you can add an opt-in form on your website! Adding a Single Client It’s extremely straightforward to add a single client in Mailchimp. We recommend using the add client option when you have only a few to add, otherwise it gets rather tedious. To begin, start at the home page for your Mailchimp account (you need to be logged in!). Click on the Audience button on the left-hand side. Click on the All contacts option on the yellow bar (highlighted in green above). This will bring you to the Audience portion of your Mailchimp where you can view subscribers, manage contacts, add contacts, and much more! Click on the Add Contacts tab and select the Add a Subscriber option. Now you can add in the new Subscriber! Fill in the required information and add or create a tag if you wish. Make sure you have permission from the subscriber before adding them to your Mailchimp, you do not want to violate...
Plugin highlight: Updraft Plus – Backup/Restore You're Reading: Plugin highlight: Updraft Plus – Backup/Restore In Resources Contact us Subscribe Updraft Plus is an incredible plugin to back up, migrate, or clone your site! Updraft Plus is our go-to pro plugin to backup, migrate, and restore sites. Hacking, server crashes, dodgy updates, or simple user error can ruin your WordPress site. Having a reliable backup plugin can mean the difference between having a site, and having to completely remake your site from scratch. Hannah Raeside Office Manager, Pod Creative What is a backup? Simply put, a website backup is a copy of all of your website data. The backup can include a backup of the database, plugins, themes, uploads, and more. With your website’s backup, you can clone or restore your site to the point of the last backup. If something goes wrong such as a hack or a bad update, your site can be restored to the last backup point. As a rule we at Pod Creative backup all files, and we recommend you do too! Set a schedule! One feature of Updraft Plus we absolutely adore is the ability to schedule your backups. Depending on the size of the site and the amount of new information that is added, we range from daily to monthly backups for our scheduled backups. The best part? If you decide to do a one-off backup, such as before a large website update or after the addition of an important post, you can simply perform a backup! One-off backups can be performed at any time, even the day before a scheduled backup. Choose your preferred...
Chrome Extension Highlight: Grammarly You're Reading: Chrome Extension Highlight: Grammarly In Resources Contact us Subscribe Grammarly is an incredible AI-powered digital writing assistant. We all use Grammarly at Pod Creative, it’s an incredible tool to help with spelling, grammar, and more. Let’s face it, we all write every day so why not use a program that makes it easier! One of the features I love is the tone detector. It’s so easy to misinterpret someone’s tone of voice in an email, I check all my emails with the tone detector to make sure I’m not coming across as too harsh. Hannah Raeside Office Manager, Pod Creative What is Grammarly? Grammarly is an AI-powered program designed to help users create mistake-free writing. Grammarly’s product offers grammar checking, spell checking, and plagiarism detection services along with suggestions about writing clarity, concision, vocabulary, delivery style, and tone. How does it work? Grammarly automatically detects potential grammar, spelling, punctuation, word choice, tone, and style mistakes in writing, following standard linguistic prescription. Algorithms flag potential issues in the text and suggest context-specific corrections for grammar, spelling, wordiness, style, punctuation, and plagiarism, although some are only for premium users. It is available as a web or desktop editor, as a browser extension for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge, and as an app for both iOS and Android. Where does the extension work? As Grammarly says, the extension works where you do! Currently, Grammarly works in Gmail, Outlook, Messenger, Yahoo, Slack, Google Docs, Jira, Salesforce, Medium, Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, and the list constantly grows. We use Grammarly primarily in Gmail, Facebook, and Google Docs. However, the...
Mailchimp for Beginners: Account Basics You're Reading: Mailchimp for Beginners: Account Basics In Resources & Tutorials Contact us Subscribe Mailchimp is a popular email marketing service used to reach subscribers across the globe. Mailchimp is a fantastic way to reach current and potential future clients with minimal effort. Many different styles of e-newsletters can be set up to alert clients to new products, new services, website updates, and more! We send a monthly newsletter to our subscribers with post updates, client shout outs, recently completed projects, and much more. Hannah Raeside Office Manager, Pod Creative Who should use Mailchimp? Every business should have an active Mailchimp account! Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to promote your business, whether your goal is to build your brand or sell more products. These emails can be anything from automated RSS feeds sending a compilation of the new posts on your site to specially crafted messages. It’s all up to you! Modern email marketing is based on the principles of consent, segmentation, and personalization. Choose a plan! Choosing the right plan is wholely dependent on your audience. Most businesses we work with don’t need a paid plan, the free one works great! Pod Creative utilizes the free plan from Mailchimp and its a fantastic option to keep your marketing costs low while reaching up to 2,000 people. When first starting out with Mailchimp we recommend starting off with the free plan, you can always upgrade if need be! Below is a comparative photo highlighting the different plans available Compare Mailchimp Plans Fun Fact! If you decide to go with a paid...
DNS, A Records, CNAME Records, and MX Records explained You're Reading: DNS, A Records, CNAME Records, and MX Records explained In Resources Contact us Subscribe DNS, A Records, MX Records, and CNAME Records are common tech acronyms but what do they mean, and why are they important? When moving a client onto our hosting package we often have to adjust their A records and MX records before the transfer is complete. Most of our clients are unaware these records exist but they are an integral part of your website, and the internet itself! Today we are giving you some background into what DNS records are and how they influence your experience on the internet. Hannah Raeside Office Manager, Pod Creative What is DNS? DNS or the Domain Name System is an integral part of the internet, allowing users to easily navigate to various websites. Every device that’s connected to the internet has its own unique IP address, and this includes websites. However, IP addresses are made up of long strings of numbers, so typing one into your browser every time you want to visit Facebook or Instagram isn’t feasible. That’s where the DNS comes in. The Domain Name System assigns websites an easy to remember domain name, such as podcreative.ca and ties them to corresponding IP addresses so visitors can access your site! What are DNS records?DNS records tell the DNS which URLS are associated with what IP address. This way, your browser knows where to send requests when you type in a domain address. DNS Records include A Records, AA Records, CNAME Records, MX Records, NS Records, PTR Records, SOA Records, SRV...
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