The problem of getting infected with malware is that Google might mark your site as “unsafe”. A message may be displayed to that effect to the visitors. It could be a great deal of embarrassment and loss of face for your company. Also, if some malicious code is embedded in your site, a search engine would continue to crawl it and the links found in the source code may get indexed to your link profile. That could get you into further trouble.

How would you know that you have been hacked?

It is not always easy to tell if your site has been hacked. You should look for malicious links in your source code first. For example, if you have a site called yoursite.com, where ‘yoursite’ represents your website, and you see links and content that does not seem remotely related to your site, it is possible that your site has been hacked.

What would you do in the aftermath of a malware attack?

If you feel that the security of your website has been compromised, you should immediately start by changing and strengthening websites. If you have a WP powered website, you should change your FTP password and your WP admin password. Try to set longer and stronger passwords which use multiple characters because hackers often use software which are extremely quick and can use brute force to guess the correct password. You may consider changing the file access permission to ‘read only’ in case you find malicious links in your ‘.htaccess’ files.

One more important tip is to check your plugins in WP because they are often infected, especially if not updated. Just disable them by renaming the directory. If the live web scanner shows that your computer is now clean, you would know that that problem was in the plugin. You can now change the name of the plugin directory to the original one, and the site would go live again.

Conclusion

If you are not very tech-savvy or someone who is not good with programming, you could leave the problem to a professional expert. You may visit stackddesign.com, and create a ticket explaining the malware problem, and the professionals at ‘stackd.design’ will take care of the malware problem for you.

The post How to Remove malware from your Website? appeared first on Stacked Site.

WordPress checks the child theme first for a particular functionality and if it does not exist, then WordPress checks its parent theme for the functionality. According to ‘ElegantThemes’, 85% of WordPress users modify themes but only 35% use child themes. The reason could be a lack of knowledge about child themes or perceived difficulty in creating one.

Reasons for using child themes

• Makes updates easier: If you update without a child theme, you can either update or lose the changes that you have made to the theme or not update it at all. Of course, not updating the themes, plugins, and the software WordPress would make it outdated, and cause it to lose efficiency. Security may also be compromised.
• Makes the process of development easier: If you decide to make an update without a child theme, you may be adding snippets of code to the code base of the original theme, which could run into hundreds if not thousands of lines. That means, tracking the changes may become cumbersome later on. It makes more sense to make changes to the child theme which contains less number of files and also less code to handle. That makes the documentation process easier.
• Makes reverting to the original condition easier: If you think that customization of the theme did not go according to your plan, you can simply disable the child theme, and everything would go back to the original state.

Steps for creating a child theme

A child theme can be created by following these simple steps:

1. A theme directory needs to be created in the WordPress install.
2. A style sheet with appropriate information about your child theme has to be created.
3. You may now use the functionalities of the parent theme.
4. Activate the child theme, and the WordPress site would look like the original.

Conclusion

A child theme has a lot of advantages and is easy to use, contrary to popular belief. If you are a designer who makes frequent changes to your WordPress supported blog or website, start using child themes and enjoy the advantages.

The post Why should you be Using Child Theme for your WordPress Site? appeared first on Stacked Site.

While Robot.txt is an exclusion protocol and tells search engines what not to crawl on your site, sitemaps do the exact opposite. It helps search engines index important portions of the website and thus improve its visibility. Google was the first search engine to use XML sitemaps which are different from ordinary HTML sitemaps. Now, other search engines are also following suit and thus the importance of sitemaps have grown further from the point of view of SEO.

Advantages of sitemaps

1. A sitemap is like a blueprint: A sitemap is like a blueprint for building a house. It guides people who are working on the project to design a website. It should be kept in a central location and in a format that makes it easily accessible. It helps everybody working on the project to know the project status, the changes that have been made or changes that may be made. It saves wastage of resources and extra work that would have been required otherwise.
2. A sitemap helps to understand the goals: A sitemap gives a goal and a plan to the designer. It helps the designing team to understand what they exactly want from this website and what needs to be done in order to attain those goals.
3. Avoid duplication of content: It would be a waste of time and resources if you continue to create similar content again, and again, every time you need it. It is far more elegant and efficient to interlink content. A sitemap helps you to understand which pages exist where and how they have been interlinked. It makes the process of linking easier.
4. Sitemaps make it easier for search engines to index changes: Although search engines take a lot of time to index new pages or changes to your website, the process can be made more streamlined by having a sitemap which captures the changes.

Conclusion

A sitemap is an essential part of a website from the point of view of design, SEO, and navigability. Google does not even penalize sites if they have one XML sitemap and another HTML sitemap. As the importance of indexing increases and search engines come equipped with better crawling algorithms, websites would need good sitemaps to make the process of loading the site URLs quicker.

The post Importance of Sitemaps for your Websites appeared first on Stacked Site.

Low PHP memory limit set by website host

Shared hosting providers often do this. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough memory for your plug-ins to run, or scripts to be executed, or both, ultimately resulting in the White Screen of Death.

There is a simple fix for this:
Simply log in to your FTP server, find the public_html folder, and open the wp-config.php file in a text editor. Add the line

define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘64M’);

to the PHP code (you should find a section starting with some lines later – anywhere between these two lines will do), save the file and close it.

Plug-ins

A faulty plug-in could be causing the White Screen of Death. In the public_html folder, look for a sub-folder named wp-content. Inside this, there should be a folder named plugins. All you have to do is rename it to something else, like ‘Betsy’ – or any other name you like. Then see if your site is working, minus the plug-ins. If it is, you now know for sure that the White Screen of Death is caused by an incompatible plug-in.

What is the solution?

Inside the plugins (or Betsy as it is now) folder, you will find a folder for each of of your plug-ins. Rename Betsy back to plugins, but try the renaming process for each plug-in’s folder (and then reloading the site) until you find out which one is causing the White Screen of Death. You find the plug-in responsible when you have renamed that plug-in’s folder and the White Screen of Death doesn’t occur.

After you have zeroed in on the culprit, see if you can find an alternative plug-in for your website. If not, try updating it to its latest version. If none of the plug-ins are causing the White Screen of Death, then it might be your WordPress theme.

WordPress theme

In the public_html folder, there should be a folder named themes. Rename it, and the site should revert back to its default theme. If the White Screen of Death no longer appears, you know your theme was causing it. Just like we did with the plug-ins, you can rename it back to themes, but before doing so, you can rename the active theme’s folder name.

This changes your theme, but better that than a White Screen of Death. You can then try downloading a new WordPress them for your site.

Too technical? We can get your WordPress site back up and running for FREE. And in less than an hour!

The post Get Rid of the White Screen of Death – Permanently! appeared first on Stacked Site.

With WordPress, you could choose from any of 16 designs for social media icons, and you can also add animation to them, like mouse-over effects or automatic shuffling. The social media icons could also be made to ‘float’. This makes visitors more likely to click on them, and they can be prompted further if you add ‘counts’ to the social media icons. The latter has a psychological effect (most people follow the herd, and if one or a few persons have ‘liked’ or ‘shared’ it on social media already, they are more likely to do the same).

Where should you place the social media icons?

You could do this at the top of the post. If a few people have ‘liked’ or ‘shared’ it, then that means the article must be interesting enough to read.

You could place it beside the post. This could be done in such a way that they always remain there, no matter how much you scroll up or down. Left or right? Research shows that people focus more on the left side – which is why Google has its search results on the left and paid advertising on the right.

The bottom of the post is also a good idea. If the content is great, people will want to click on them after reading the article.

What you should choose depends on the theme you are using, and also the length of the post. If it is too long, people might not get to the end of the article for them to click on the social media icons. If there is space at the sides, you might want to consider placing them beside your post. This especially makes sense if there are other call-to-action buttons at the top – you don’t everything bunched up together that the social media icons are lost in the crowd.

How many social media icons? And which ones?

A study shows that the most social media activity is caused by ‘tweets’, readers mentioning the link to your article on Twitter. This amounts to 38.6% of the total, and in second place is Facebook ‘likes’ (33.8%), followed by Facebook ‘shares’ (26.7%). Everything else is minimal, but LinkedIn can be great if your posts are aimed at those who work in an office. If you are into fashion, Pinterest and Instagram are also good choices.

The post Add Social Media Sharing Option to Your Pages / Posts appeared first on Stacked Site.

1. Nobody likes routine: The 21^st century is all about variety. A modern man is restless with routine and is easily bored with everything. The same is true about people who visit your websites. Websites whose designs are updated from time to time greatly please their followers as they provide some fresh air and break from the monotony. People want variety, novelty and freshness. This is definitely one of the most important reasons you should consider updating your website theme.

2. To make things simpler: Nobody likes a website which is difficult to navigate through. Today people like short-cuts. And as the owner of a website, you need to make sure you give them the shortest cuts possible! People hate clicking links and sub-links, headings and sub-headings. They just want the info, and they want it now. So try getting feedback about how you can enhance the ease of access of your website. Simple, functional websites are always better than complex, complicated ones.

3. To gain more trust: It’s common sense that a website which has the same consistent design from ancient times until now will be seen as one that is not worth coming back to. Why? Because your readers may just feel that since you are unable to get creative, you lack substance! This is why products, automobiles and even buildings keep wearing new faces every now and then. Letting that dust gather on your website design is going to make you lose your visitors.

4. To have an edge over competitors: And of-course, the most important of all- outshine your competitors! It is true that substance wins over appearance; But how will you present the substance of your website to your readers if the appearance is not catchy enough? A catchy and attractive theme will definitely increase the value of your content and your credibility.

Convinced but confused about what you can do? Just contact the pros and watch your website bloom into a masterpiece!

The post Four Reasons Why You Must Update Your Website Theme Today appeared first on Stacked Site.

Some argue that websites can be built without breaking a sweat with CSS, JavaScript or HTML. Then why should frameworks find an application in web design? But others say that if you are building a simple website without a lot of pages or a dynamic website, frameworks find good use. If you have to create multiple log-in credentials on your website, a framework would provide you with a structure to do it easily without having to do it multiple times manually.  Frameworks are templates which contain snippets of codes and other design elements which help you to take care of the basic design needs of your web-page and help you to save a lot of valuable project time.

Another major advantage of a framework is that a lot of them have been tested, debugged and validated. So, it not only saves you the time of writing the code in markup language but also save you the time of testing.

When you are designing a website, you will have your areas of strength. There may be other areas where you need some help. So, if you are using frameworks, you get instant, ready-made help.

What is a framework?

A framework is a set of tools or design conventions that is stored in the form of modules and can be invoked by calling it as a function in a code that you may be writing. A lot of ordinary tasks are taken care of through these modules. A framework doesn’t mean a licensed product that you will have to subscribe to or buy. You can create your own framework and store it as a module in a library and call it any number of times.

Advantages

• They are usually very fast. You can use an API to create a simple design in one-tenth of the time probably of what you would have taken otherwise.
• They can boost the efficiency as designers can focus more on solving the unique challenges rather than having to take care of common problems perfunctorily. This definitely boosts output and problem solving abilities.
• It definitely brings down the final cost of the project at hand.

Disadvantages

• The scope of work may be limited as you have to use the same framework essentially even with modifications.
• Frameworks contain files like normalize.css that have not been configured for the particular context in which you want to apply them.

A framework has both pros and cons. It is up to you to decide whether you want to use them or not. If you can identify the right context for its application, it does provide you a lot of leveraging power and speed. Carefully protect your individuality even when you are using an open source framework.

The post Should You Be Using Frameworks In Your Web Designs? appeared first on Stacked Site.

A well-organized grid reduces visual chaos and provides a breathing space to each design element so that they stand out individually as well as a single unit. A well-coordinated grid layout can help the designer to determine the right color proportions and use the right balance between design elements and white space at the margin of each row and column.

Grids are also simple. Although a grid based layout may not be suitable for all projects, a bulk of the modern design projects which need speed and efficiency are using grid based layouts to establish order without looking monotonous.

Some of the benefits of grid-based layouts are as follows

1. Aesthetic appeal: Grids can maintain clarity within chaos. It ushers in a certain order which makes it possible for the designer to clearly highlight the different design elements and use vast amounts of content in a single grid layout without cluttering the space. It is sensual without being exotic.
2. Enjoys the benefits of economies of scale: A design grid once created can be used as a road-map for future design ideas and the time of creating a new design reduces. It allows different designers to collaborate effectively since the core grid is in place and all they have to do is create different designs by switching places of components on the same grid i.e. changing the alignment or using new components on the same grid.
3. Allows creation of responsive web design: A grid-based layout is ideal for creating a responsive web design because it uses a single set of design codes to be used for the creation of a website for different devices.

A grid based layout is cost-effective and saves a lot of time. If you are building a commercial web design, in 8 out of 10 cases, you would need to use grid-based designs for their inherent advantages.

The post Why do Most Experts Prefer a Grid-Based Web Design? appeared first on Stacked Site.

Many clients want to cut corners or simply want to get a job done at the lowest possible cost which may compromise the security or functional aspects of the project. A project manager has to step up to the task of telling the client about the pitfalls and the future consequences of a rushed job.

A project manager is also expected to evaluate the financial return on a particular project and try to utilize the best team available to maximize profit while creating value for the project. He/She also has to ensure that there is no gap between what is promised and what is delivered.

Flexible project plans are more effective

In order to succeed at a goal, a team needs to have a proper plan. It is important for a UX design team to focus on the process of building a website which is user-friendly and which generates leads for the client. That is only possible if the team has all the right information and inputs from the client. They will need to know what the users of the website expect from it and what kind of a target group the client has in mind. A project manager can step in to collect all the relevant information and pass it onto the design team.

Effective project management can help the two sides to set a measurable and realistic goal. It is important for them to agree on the metrics that would be used to measure the outcomes. Providing information early on will also make it easy for the client to allocate a budget for the website and also provide any other resources that may be needed. Project management is important for the UX design team as well as for the client. Whichever side you belong to, you have to use it effectively for all round success of a project.

The post What is the Role of Project Management in UX Design Projects? appeared first on Stacked Site.

• De-clutter your site landing pages. A site that has too much going on will leave visitors both overwhelmed and confused. They won’t be able to spot that CTA button amidst all that clutter. It can also leave users under the impression that you are trying too hard to win them over. You want to keep your site design simple and appealing.
• While it’s not a bad idea to do up your site a little differently than other sites out there, you don’t want to miss out on the basics in the process. Online users have come to expect a certain few basics on all sites- About Us, Careers, Investors, Social Media, Store Locator, Privacy Policy, and Contact Us pages for example. You will usually find most of these tabs on the footer of the page. Make sure your website has these basics covered, so site visitors do not feel as if they’re in unfamiliar online territory.
• Icons and images do a good job of upping that professional quotient of your website. Images are great storytellers. In fact. some of the biggest brands out there have full-blown images as the backdrop for their site. Icons are equally important for a professional touch. Whether you’re talking about the features of your service or why customers should choose your business, the use of icons makes it look more professional and believable.
• Keep the navigation simple, so visitors easily find what they’re here for. Online users are usually quite impatient to find things. A site with navigation that is complex or not user-friendly will negatively affect user experience, and may cause users to leave the site. A search bar and site map are indispensable for professional sites. A smooth, intuitive navigation could mean lower bounce rate and higher conversions for your brand.

A quick site audit from a professional Brisbane web design agency can reveal what changes your site needs to appear professional. Remember, how your site looks not just affects whether or not users decide to stay on your site, but also their purchase decisions with your brand.

The post How to Give Your Website a Professional Appeal appeared first on Stacked Site.