Personalized profitable websites for authors
After building websites for coaches, consultants and small businesses for over 15 years I discovered a new way to create your best website ever.
It used to be a struggle to find the right words for my clients’ website.
Without ‘the right words,’ it was a challenge to find great images. The ones that create a “Wow!” response the minute someone lands on your site.
How to properly credit any image you download from a free stock photo website:
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As a fashion and beauty editor for Glamour, Mademoiselle and Weight Watchers Magazine photo credits were a must.
Today many free stock image photo sites say, ‘Attribution is not required, but appreciated.’ I like to give credit to anyone who has given me something of value for free.
The following instructions are for WordPress
Part of giving credit is linking to the photographer and the stock photo house (“Photo courtesy of [link to photographer] via [link to stock photo house].)
The problem is you don’t want the search engines, like Google, to follow the link because Google may think you are a spammer who is trying to create false links, just for attention.
The solution is to create a nofollow link. Here’s how:
Super important!
Search engines cannot yet read your images so you need to describe each image you upload for people who are visually impaired.
This short article will show you how to tag your images in WordPress.
Hi. I’m Nancy Fields. I’ve been a graphic design for over 28 years. I build websites for coaches, entrepreneurs and small business owners.
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Topics include WordPress, design, and website tech challenges my customer are struggling with.
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Featured images courtesy of picjumbo via Pexels and Pikwizard
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You will create a great user experience by adding:
Five must haves on a contact page for your company: name, address, and phone number. And you’ll see a qualifying statement here because for your company address, you only need your town and your state, or even just your state. That gives people a sense of where you are in the world, but you don’t have to put in your full address if people are not coming to, you know, to a store, for example.
And then, add your company phone number. And this is where I’m excited to show you.
I have some additional information about adding a company phone number with a mobile friendly link. So if people want to phone you on their cell phone, they can just hit the link and it goes right to your phone.
Add your email address, but this is a thing that I learned many years ago: Do not put a live link in your website because there are spam robots that crawl websites looking for email links.
I truly do have a customer who insisted she wanted the live email address because it really is user-friendly for customers. But she got hit with hundreds of spam emails a day. Soon she was receiving thousands of spam emails in a week.
She spent a lot of time deleting the spam from her email inbox, and then she spent money and time getting it resolved.
So a Contact Form is great because it lets people contact you. They give them you their name and email address.
And you could even ask them some questions if you want to know a little bit about them before you reach out to them.
So it’s about you then reaching out to them.
I’m going to show you how to create a live phone link. How to add it manually, and how to use a plugin to add a phone link.
What I did, I just hovered over the phone number and I hit link. Then I typed in T E L for telephone, added a colon, and then entered the number: No dashes or spaces.
That is the way to manually add that in.
If you want something fancier. For example, if you wanted a Call Us button, this is done with a plugin called WP Call Button.
It is free.
I set that up in the dashboard under Settings. I set up the phone number in the US. I put the phone number in: as you can see, no dashes. I chose where I wanted it to appear. I chose my button color, which was the color of all of her buttons on our website. And I put show everywhere and save the changes. And that’s how easy it was to fill it in.
But there again, you do not need to have a plug in if you don’t want to. You can have something as simple selecting your text and linking it with TEL colon and your phone number. And you’re good to go.
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The Gallery Block in WordPress 5.6 makes is super easy and FAST to build an image gallery. The time consuming parts are steps 1-3 listed below. Once you get beyond that, you won’t believe how quickly you can put together a beautiful gallery of images!
See how to easily add and rearrange the images in your gallery to you get the look you want on any post or page using the free Gutenberg Gallery Block in WordPress 5.6.
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If you are an artist people want to see your work! Painters, ceramists, photographers, sculptors. Upload your work to your WordPress website and create a gallery in a few minutes.
Are you an author? Upload your book covers and add a link to buy.
If you write a travel blog, or any blog post where you want to show a collection of photos, a gallery is a great way for your visitors to experience your photos in a neat and tidy grid layout.
The WordPress Gallery Block makes it easy to change the order of your images, and add or delete photos, too.
If you want to sell images, purchase a WordPress plugin, like EnviraGallery, that lets you accept payments right from your website.
The pro version of EnviraGallery creates a gallery plus integrates with WooCommerce.
I have used the EnviraGallery and it creates a beautiful gallery quickly and easily. I have not used the pro version to sell photos or artwork.
I have also worked with WooCommerce and have integrated PayPal and other payment processors to sell items through a website. The learning curve with WooCommerce can be steep. There are many steps to selling items from your website and adding payment and shipping options.
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My customer was attracting a lot of SPAM comments on her WordPress website and asked me if I could make it stop.
Watch me as I remove her current SPAM comments and prevent them from coming into her site in the future.
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Step 2 (above) stopped SPAM comments on future posts. To prevent SPAM comments from getting on to your existing Posts:
Disable Comments is a plugin that will disable comments site wide: Posts, Pages, and Media).
My customer was receiving a lot of spam comments; there are 176. As I quickly scroll through all her comments, you can see who is sending them. It’s a little bit suspicious.
And also these comments don’t really make a lot of sense. Some of them are in a different language.
Unfortunately she must have approved a few of the comments because WordPress doesn’t allow comments to come in until you approve them. Something from Bollywood.
These just don’t make a lot of sense. So I’m going to be getting rid of the existing comments as well as protecting her site for, for future.
I’m going to go to the comment section. From the dashboard go to comments. Look through all the comments. I know that they are not legitimate, so I’m going to do bulk select by clicking the Author button. Then, from the bulk select dropdown menu, click Mark as spam and Apply.
I will put them into the Spam folder. There’s All, Mine, Pending, Approved, and Spam. They will be added to her spam folder, which currently has 76 SPAM items, or items that have been marked as SPAM. So now I want to go to her Spam folder because I don’t want her spam folder items to go over 100 spam emails, because if it goes over one hundred, it can possibly crash the server. And it also takes quite a while to remove Spam.
As you can see, I’m in her Spam folder because it’s highlighted, or it’s black, as opposed to the others are blue. So once again, I’m going to Bulk Action, Select all under Author and then Delete permanently. Click Apply.
I will go through this process until all of the spam is removed from her Spam folder.
But as you can see in the comments section, we still have 156 spam items, or at least 156 comments to confirm that they are not spam. So I’m going to head back to All, and I’m going to repeat the process again.
There are 20 comments on each page. I will quickly look through this. If a name looks familiar, then it’s very possible it’s someone you know, you don’t want to delete them. But these don’t do not look like they’re legitimate.
They look like spam. I’m going to go through the same process, Bulk select. Mark as spam. Apply.
I will go through this process once again, page by page. And there are eight more pages to go through, but I’ll also will be looking at my spam folder because I don’t want my spam folder to go over 100. So as you can see, it’s a bit of a time-consuming process.
And because it is so time consuming, once we get rid of the spam in her current spam comments folder we’ll be moving onto the next step, which is to stop the comments from coming into future posts that she creates.
Because I have 100 spam comments I’m going to click Empty spam. This is another option.
As long as I have one hundred or fewer, when I click Empty spam, that will empty out my spam folder. That was a much quicker way than going through page by page.
Back to All. This gets me back to my current Comments that have come in, and that are waiting for my approval.
It looks like these had been a approved, but this really is SPAM. It’s the erotic film.
We know comments from Ginny are good.
And there again, I’m going to go to her Spam folder because it’s under 100 spams. The spam says 68.
I’m going to click Empty spam.
The next thing I’m going to do is stopping any spam coming into future posts. And for that I’m in the Dashboard and I’m going to go down to Settings and Discussion. And from here I’m going to uncheck, Allow people to submit comments on new posts. And then click Save changes.
The next step is I want to stop spam coming in on existing Pages and Posts. There were two comments from people the site owner knew, so I don’t want to get rid of those comments. They’re both from this one post, Strengthen Your Immune System.
I’m going to show you what I’m going to do to stop spam on existing Posts and Pages.
Go to dashboard and Posts and All posts. Select All, except that there’s one post that I want to keep the comment so I will uncheck that. Then click Apply.
Another screen comes up. Under Comments I want to choose Do not allow. Click Update. Doing this will not allow anyone to comment on any of these Posts and that will stop all spam coming into the posts that are currently on your page. Whereas, what we did previously, that stopped any spam comments from Posts or Pages you create in the future.
After I refreshed the Page, you can see there are no more comments on her page. It took out the spam comments, but because we’re saying we don’t want anyone to comment on the existing pages or future pages, this is what the site will now look like.
The other thing I wanted to show you was a plugin called Disabled Comments.
This will work as well. This is really great if you have a huge site and you’re getting well over a hundred comments a day. But if you do the work I showed you, you would not have to install a plugin. Some people don’t like installing plugins. They feel that it slows their site down, and it can. And plugins can cause problems.
The three steps I showed you about how to get rid of comments could be a great solution for you.
If you are viewing this from the YouTube or from my website, and you’d like to come to my free trainings, please go to my website fieldsgraphicdesign.com and fill out the form at the top of the page, you will not only get an invitation to join me.
Live. You’ll also receive a list of my favorite free resources for great photography that you can use on your website or in any project. And also when you join me live on 10 minute, Monday, you’ll be able to ask a question about what I’ve just trained or even about your own website. So I hope to see you on my next 10 minute, Monday.
I have FREE help sessions on Mondays. Sign up below to receive a zoom invitation to attend so you can ask me your question about WordPress. If I can’t answer it I will do my homework and feature it in an upcoming post.
I also build websites in WordPress and teach my clients the basics so they can confidently log in and make text and image changes.
FYI: My older blog images stopped showing up after I installed an SSL Certificate on my site, but most people’s blog thumbnails don’t show up because they have not added them as a featured image, or they have a plugin conflict. This article address both of those problems.
Want a WordPress website but not sure where to begin? Click here to download my website start-up cheat sheet.
You will find a few more suggestions below…
To confirm you are missing a featured image, log into your WordPress site and go to your dashboard.
If no featured image is displayed, add a featured image by clicking on “Set featured image.” Upload an image from your desktop or your media library, and be sure to tag your image.
If your featured image is not showing up on your main blog page you may have a javascript error.
To confirm this is your problem you will need to go into the development tools of your website browser. Because Google Chrome is so popular, I will show you how to check this in Chrome.
Select all your plugins before you select Disable
One person discovered their featured images were not displaying because they had a conflict between two plugins: Smush and Jetpack. She found the problem using the Health Check plugin.
In early 2020, WordPress added Health Check to the WordPress Dashboard. You will find it under Tools > Site Health, so check here before installing the Health Check plugin.
If you or your team members are continually forgetting to add your featured images, you can use a plugin called Default Featured Image.
This plugin will add the exact same featured image if you leave the “Featured image” selection blank.
The is perfect if you are just starting out and developing our brand.
I have FREE help sessions on Mondays. Sign up below to receive a zoom invitation to attend so you can ask me your question about WordPress. If I can’t answer it I will do my homework and feature it in an upcoming post.
I also build websites in WordPress and teach my clients the basics so they can confidently log in and make text and image changes.
A domain (domain name) is your unique internet address.
Want a website but not sure where to begin? Click here to download my website start-up cheat sheet.
Have you ever stumbled upon website with a “Not Secure” notice to the left of the domain name?
That’s because the website Protocol began with http, not https.
In order for your site Protocol to begin with https you need an SSL Certificate.
TLD stands for Top-level domain.
The most common TLDs are
But those aren’t the only ones. I have one that’s nancyfields.design.
You will also need to choose a TLD when you choose your domain name.
To see a complete list of over 1,000 TLDs click this link.
So many industry descriptive domain names were purchased years ago such as realtor.com it’s best to choose your first and last name, or your company name.
In 2000 my first and last name were already take, so I chose nancyfieldsdesign.com and also fieldsgraphicdesign.com.
I use both domain names so if someone types in NancyFieldsDesign.com, it redirects to FieldsGraphicDesign.com.
A few years ago I bought nancyfields.design, but it’s still “parked” meaning I own the domain but have not yet used it.
I were an author and my name was not available I could choose something else, such as nancyfieldsauthor.com, or nancyfields.blog.
If I were a coach, nancyfields.coach. An artist, nancyfields.art.
There are lots of ways to find domain names. Most hosting companies sell domain names, but I prefer logging onto https://who.is/. This website tells me within seconds if a domain name is available and at what price.
You can buy your domain from who.is, but, if you have not yet purchased a website hosting account you might want to check with them because many web hosts, like bluehost, also offer one free domain name for your first year of hosting.
Sign up below for my FREE 10-Minute Monday WordPress website Q & A sessions. You will receive an email invitation to join me live. Ask me a question about your own website, WordPress, or design.
Would love to have you join me.
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I’m in a private Facebook group with over 200 online entrepreneurs from around the world.
Last week one of the members asked if she should start a website with WordPress, or something else? So many people recommended other platforms that I began to wonder if WordPress was yesterday’s news.
And then I came to my senses.
Click here to download a cheatsheet to help you get started with WordPress.
Before you can build a website with WordPress you will first need:
Choose a hosting company that:
If you are not sure what type of support you need, choose one host and see if it meets your needs. You can always change hosting companies later as your needs change. If and when you do change hosting companies, they will often make the switch for you.
I’ve used Bluehost for years, and have built many website for customers who had hosting plans with HostGator, GreenGeeks, GoDaddy, inMotion, NameCheap, SiteGround, WPEngine, WPMktgEngine.
They all have their pluses and minuses. Just choose one and get started.
If you have not yet purchased a domain name, ask your preferred hosting company if they offer a free domain. Many of them do!
If you have already purchased a domain name, no worries. This step-by-step video shows you how to point your domain name to your new hosting account.
SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer.
An SSL certificate is a special code that keeps your data transfer more secure, which is critical is you’re asking people to give you their credit card information online.
Once installed, your SSL creates also creates a website address that begins with https vs http.
A few years ago Google decided to penalize websites that do not have an SSL certificate by adding a “Not Secure” notice to the left of the URL.
A “Not Secure” warning is a turn off, plus visitors cannot see your site without clicking through a number of “Warning Website Not Secure” settings.
Bite the bullet and purchase an SSL certificate annually.
From your website host.
It depends upon your web host. SiteGround offers a free SSL Certificate, but most web hosting companies charge between $10 – $180 per year.
If you’re just starting out and not selling anything online your web host will choose the right SSL Certificate for your needs.
Sign up below for my 10-Minute Monday WordPress website trainings and get an email invitation to join me live. It’s FREE. Plus because they’re live you can ask a question.
Would love to have you join me.
P.S. I also design websites and have group trainings. Sign up below so I can keep you in the loop.