Many WordPress bloggers have experience with a loved one suffering from a mental illness. Blogging about these relationships and the feelings and hardships they cause is widely recognized as a healthy and productive activity, helping reduce negative feelings on the part of the blogger and ease tensions in the relationship. These blogs can range from detailed examinations of personal issues to unfiltered venting. They can also help readers who might be experiencing similar issues in their lives.
Mental health professionals have embraced blogging as a useful educational tool, as well as a potential source of research data. Widespread knowledge of mental health issues leads to greater public understanding of the challenges facing people who suffer from them, and reduces the stigma of suffering from mental illness or seeking help for it. WordPress blogs can also serve as an easily documentable record of public mental health issues, leading to advances in treating and mitigating mental illness.
Perhaps the most popular form of mental health blogging is personal journals about one’s own experience with mental illness. WordPress blogs can be a valuable tool for self reflection, helping a person either accept their challenges or understand that they need to seek help. Multiple studies have shown strong evidence that short-term writing about emotions can diminish anxiety, increase immune responses, and lessen the impact of sleep disorders. Long term blogging is shown to even out blood pressure, reduce inflammation that leads to arthritis and asthma, and significantly reduce racing thoughts and symptoms of depression. Many therapists encourage their clients to keep a blog, which makes it easy for the therapist to follow the patients’ writing and more quickly and accurately diagnose and assist the patient. 

Blogging also has many social benefits, which lead to better mental health. Reduced anxiety, increased confidence, and improved understanding of personal issues are all observable effects of keeping a personal mental health WordPress blog. Blogging about physical health issues can also help writers connect to other people with similar issues, leading to an improved sense of community and access to medical resources and information.

There are some potential downfalls to using a blog as a mental health journal. Public commentary can be useful, but it is also potentially abusive or harmful. It is important to recognize that a blog is not a complete substitute for therapy with a professional, just a useful accessory. There are also negative communities across the blogging sphere that can amplify negative thoughts and harmful ideation, or even provide dangerous techniques that follow some mental illnesses. It is important to seek professional help with any severe condition.

Blogging about mental health issues is a useful tool from many angles. Shared experience helps both the writer and the reader, and simple safety guidelines coupled with professional guidance can result in a valuable asset for the individual and society as a whole.

The post Blogging as a Mental Health Resource appeared first on Clockpunk Studios.

Keyword optimization is the paramount concern in getting more traffic to your site. WordPress blogs can use keywords to ensure that the major search engines, such as Google, return their site as a result when users search for terms related to the subject of your blogs. Identify words and phrases that are relevant to your audience, relatively uncommon, and then use them frequently throughout your blog, including in the header and descriptive parts. 

Featuring a guest blog post from a peer is an excellent boost to both bloggers. Seek guest blogs and write blogs for other WordPress sites to engage your overlapping audiences and build your reputation in your field. Social media is a good aid for finding people to share posts with. Start by leaving comments on others’ blogs to establish a relationship before contacting other authors about possible guest blogs.

Social media is also an excellent way to promote your blogs for free. Regularly linking your blog to your social media profile and posting about new blogs are useful ways to attract new viewers. Engaging with your peers’ posts is a good way to build professional friendships that can increase your professional reputation and help direct more people to your own work. Facebook groups are a good way to find new ideas and material for your blog. Quora is also useful as a source of blogging material relevant to your WordPress website and as a tool for finding others in your professional community. Billions of people visit social platforms every day, it’s easy to capture some of that traffic for yourself.

Posting new blogs on a frequent and consistent schedule is key to maintaining readership. Nobody likes an abandoned blog, or one that feels inconsistent. Regularly having new content  will keep users coming back and engaging with the contents of your WordPress website on a continual basis. It’s also important to interact with readers in the comments section of your blog, which can serve as a useful promotion (people will return much more often to a blog where they are involved in a conversation) and answer any questions users might have about your work. 

Holding a contest or giveaway is a great way to push a large volume of traffic to your website. People love the idea of competing on the internet, and the possibility of getting something free can drive impressive numbers of people to your WordPress site. Decide on a prize (even if it’s just bragging rights), establish the rules and conditions, set a deadline, and then use the techniques above to publicize your contest or giveaway. 

WordPress is an excellent platform for your blog, and using easy and free promotional methods like these can grow your blog (and the impact it has on your website) quickly. Clockpunk Studios looks forward to helping you grow your blog and brand.

The post Increasing Your Blog’s Exposure: Proven and Easy Tips appeared first on Clockpunk Studios.

Graphic designers have been around since the beginnings of commercial publishing and print media. Traditionally, they worked with printed promotional materials, such as brochures, business cards, and advertising posters. As digital media has expanded, the role of the graphic designer has also grown to include digital assets such as logo design, creating interface icons, and, of course, website design. Graphic designers have a solid background in visual art skills, such as color theory, visual composition, and typography. They are also responsible for creating visual assets, such as logos, and ensuring that those assets are consistent across a brand. Graphic designers who work with WordPress are also skilled at applying these methods and practices to the design of WordPress sites.

UI, or User Interface, describes the overall look, feel and functionality of the website as it is experienced by the user. All the skills of a Graphic Designer are needed. A UI Designer is responsible for selecting colors, applying fonts and typeface, and arranging website and menu layouts. They create an online experience that is both aesthetically pleasing and functionally easy to navigate. The UI Designer works on a more technical level than Graphic Designers, and requires extensive coding knowledge to translate the visual medium into a digital product. Specialists in WordPress UI design can utilize the framework of WordPress to very quickly produce a website that attracts users and engages them with its contents, helping your brand grow.

A Visual Designer incorporates many aspects of Graphic Design and UI Design, but is more responsible for overall brand management and communicating the concepts and focus of a brand. Visual Design is a newer concept in the world of publishing, and is rarely associated with print media. Web Design is a subset of Visual Design that is focused solely on website management and design. A skilled Web Designer can create a website for you that clearly expresses the message you want to communicate, and can work with you to effectively build a WordPress site that will draw in your users and keep them immersed. 

Using a professional WordPress crew like ClockPunk Studios gives you access to in-house talent that can ensure the quality and reliability of your website. Experienced Graphic Designers, UI Designers and Web Designers can translate your vision into a concrete product that can attract new customers or readers, market products to a much wider audience, and firmly establish a public brand. Utilizing a professional is a necessary step in having a professional quality web presence, which in the modern world is needed for any business or author.

The post Visual Design In Website Publishing appeared first on Clockpunk Studios.

Why do we prefer these webhosts? There are lots of reasons, but simply put, we’ve found that they offer the things that our clients need in a hosting solution, from security and functionality to reliability and speed. Let’s take a look at a few of the key elements offered by these services:

Free SSL Certificates – What is an SSL certificate and why do you need one? The short answer is that SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. It’s a type of security protocol that helps to protect not only secure transactions but also user data on your site. Besides just being a good idea, these days SSL certificates are basically a must for any website, especially since Google began classifying any site without them as “insecure” starting in 2017. Fortunately, both DreamPress and Siteground offer free SSL certificates for all sites hosted through their service, helping you to keep your site accessible and your visitors’ data secure.

Plenty of Disk Space – Regardless of how big or small your site is right now, you’ll want to plan for room to grow. The last thing you want is for the success or growth of your business to be restricted by the limitations of your website hosting service. For Siteground, we recommend their affordable GrowBig plan, which offers 20GB of space and allows for unlimited websites, geared toward around 100,000 monthly visits. At DreamPress, the basic package is suitable for most of our clients, as it is already built to accommodate around 100,000 monthly visits and offers 30GB of space.

Resources to Keep Your Site Online – Your site is no good if people can’t go to it, and a hosting service that doesn’t have the reliability that you need to keep your site online is no good to you. That’s why we only recommend hosting options that offer the kinds of resources that will ensure that your site is always active, online, and accessible. Both Siteground and DreamHost not only offer robust hosting resources, they also provide 24/7 accessible support—not to mention on-demand backups of your site.

Server-side Caching – What is server-side caching? It’s definitely a good thing. It means that the origin server stores a temporary copy of your website. What does that mean? In practical terms, it means that your site will load a whole lot faster than it otherwise would. And in a world where we’re all accustomed to blazing-fast speeds when it comes to browsing the ‘net, if your site loads too slowly, the odds of someone navigating away from it early become incredibly high.

Those are just a few of the most important pieces of functionality to look for when it comes to choosing a webhosting service, and we recommend Siteground and DreamPress because they both offer all these and many more besides. For more information or if you have questions about how to choose the hosting service that’s right for your website, feel free to contact us anytime!

The post The Right Webhosting Tool for the Job appeared first on Clockpunk Studios.

HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, while HTTP  is Hypertext Transfer Protocol. This describes the protocol that transmits user-input information:  monetary data such as credit card numbers, personal information, and login IDs from  browser to the hosting website. The most important difference is that HTTPS sites have an additional layer of security. Sites featuring  HTTPS are much more secure, encrypting sensitive or private data input by the user. and the host are the only entities able to see the data passed over the web. yberthieves and scammers are unable to intercept your users’ data and use it to steal money or critical identity data. HTTPS is most easily imagined as a digital lock – hence the icon of HTTPS security is an image of a padlock located next to the URL. 

Boosting  your WordPress website’s search engine ranking and arriving at the top of search engine results should compel every site author. Increasing your web security optimizes your search engine rankings. This is because most major search engines have begun including the  websites’ security as an important qualifier in rankings. Websites having HTTPS was first added as a criteria for web ranking in 2014, and is now often seen as a tie-breaker for similarly ranked websites. While HTTPS is not as critical in determining web rankings as, say, key words, it should not be overlooked, especially when all the other advantages are factored in. 

Another useful aspect of adopting HTTPS is building users’ trust and confidence. The web today is littered with thousands of fake websites, and scams and data theft are rampant. This causes users to be cautious when interacting with any website that requires personal information or payments. With your website HTTPS secured, users feel they can trust your intent, the identities of the hosts, and the veracity of your content. Many WordPress site owners use their site to gather personal information, enabling them to provide goods and services. This data  may be credit card details, biographical information, and physical addresses. Some  websites require you to log in  with usernames and passwords. HTTPS protects any sensitive data from malicious cyber criminals, unauthorized uses, and any illicit third-party access. 

HTTPS also helps boost browsing speed. Modern browsers are enabled to identify  less than secure websites. When this happens, they pause the session and issue a warning for the user to confirm if they want to proceed to the unsecured website. This can make users leave your WordPress website. With an HTTPS-enabled website, browsers will load faster. HTTPS encrypts data and wards its integrity.

HTTPS gives your WordPress website defenses that can be helpful for dialing up user confidence and retention. There are multiple additional  benefits from utilizing HTTPS certification, such as boosting SEO  and rapid website loading times. If you are building a WordPress site on your own, maintaining an existing site, or contracting a site to be built for you, HTTPS makes sense.

The post How HTTPS Can Help Your WordPress Site Thrive appeared first on Clockpunk Studios.

Pursue your writing and audience with enthusiasm. Regardless of your subject matter, your readers will be able to tell if you are writing about a subject close to your heart. Choose subject matter, reflected in your WordPress site, that you’re really interested in sharing with readers. This will make it easier for you to captivate readers by letting your enthusiasm shine through in your work, and helps readers discover you through your WordPress author’s page.

These days, authors trying to engage significantly with readers should look beyond the text of books or other traditional media to the internet. Many popular writers already have a strong presence online, whether via their own WordPress website or social media, and regularly interact with a strong base of followers or fans. Consider blogging, podcasting or producing a YouTube channel to connect with readers and potential readers directly through your Author’s page. Build a professional and friendly image, focused on your writing, on social media sites frequented by your target audience, such as Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, or Instagram. Established publishers are much more likely to work with new writers who already have a following, and writers who self-publish will find it difficult to prosper without one.

The most tested and reliable writing advice is to write constantly, revise often, and seek input from your readers and peers. Getting feedback from readers will teach you how to engage your audience and get them to pay attention to your words. Your social media presence is a valuable resource for receiving and responding to feedback,and is a great way to show your connection to your work, while communicating with your audience on a personal level. Reader feedback and interaction is easy to achieve with a WordPress author’s page. 

With these ideas in mind, it’s time to set your goal to growing your audience base. Start by considering a press release. When you are releasing a new book or short story, or if you’re launching a podcast or YouTube channel focused on your writing, a press release is one of the best routes to spreading the word so you can start expanding the audience for your writing. Press releases are easy to integrate into the blog feature of your WordPress site.

All of these techniques are easy to integrate into an author’s page, and the modularity of WordPress makes it ideal for maintaining and quickly updating your presence on the internet. Allocating the time and resources to engage readers will ensure that more readers discover your work, and that those readers will be back for everything you publish down the road.

The post Effectively Engaging Readers – A Continuous Practice appeared first on Clockpunk Studios.

The goal of this redesign has been simplicity and elegance. We think our work for our clients speaks louder than anything we can say in words here on our site, so we’ve tried to get out of our own way with this redesign. It’s possible that streamlining things will impact our SEO, but luckily, very little of our work comes in via search engines. If that’s the case, then we’ll be forced to update our blogging more regularly to keep our presence out there.

In 2020, we don’t expect much to change at Clockpunk Studios. Much like this redesign, we’re focused on refining ourselves rather than reinventing the wheel. Our goal is to keep getting better at what we do, and our clients will hopefully benefit from that.

Best of luck to everyone in 2020! We look forward to working with new and old clients alike.

The post Our Clockpunk Studios 2020 Redesign appeared first on Clockpunk Studios.

Clockpunk Studios is offering an easy package to our clients handle this change for you with your WordPress website.  We can resolve the URL issue, make sure your traffic redirects from http:// to https:// and get a free certificate installed from you, provided your hosting platform offers one (otherwise, you will need to buy a secure certificate from your hosting platform, but these are increasingly affordable).  This package cost is a one time fee of $100 to cover our time making these changes.

There is a big push to get all websites securely encrypted in 2017, and Clockpunk Studios is here to help you get on board!  Send us an email at studio@clockpunkstudios.com to get on my calendar and get this upgrade taken care of for your site.

The post An Important Note Regarding SSL Encryption on Your Website appeared first on Clockpunk Studios.

“My friend has a WordPress site, and it got hacked.  I’ve heard that WordPress has a lot of security problems, so I’m worried about using it.”

We completely understand these concerns, and a few years back, we were also concerned about the security of WordPress itself.  However, we don’t believe that WordPress itself is fundamentally insecure, and I’ll try to explain here the reasons that WordPress sometimes has a reputation of being insecure.  In short, WordPress is a victim of its own popularity and success.

Right now, WordPress is the software running around 27% of all websites in the entire world.  For as diverse an ecosystem as the world of web development is, that’s a pretty astonishing number.  WordPress competes with literally hundreds of content management systems for market share, and that this number is so high means that an awful lot of developers have confidence in WordPress as their platform of choice.  It means there are tens of thousands of people (maybe even millions) working together to develop resources for WordPress in the form of plug-ins and themes.  You could develop your own content management system from scratch, but why do that when, by using WordPress, you effectively have an enormous development team working to provide you new features and tools.  There’s a real cost savings there that can’t be ignored!

This popularity comes with one major downside.  If you’re a hacker looking to develop an automated tool to easily compromise the most sites you can, WordPress is an obvious choice.  If you write one solution that might hack 27% of the entire World Wide Web, then that’s a good, effective use of your resources as well.

And it’s not just your website the attackers are after; it’s your resources.  One main reason many are looking to compromise WordPress websites is so that they can redirect your search engine traffic to spam websites selling black market pharmaceuticals and so on, or to send spam email.  Just because you don’t have credit card information on your site doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in accessing and utilizing your site’s resources to do various nefarious things.  It’s nothing personal.  Your site is just one of tens of thousands their automated tools have targeted, and if it finds an exploitable point of entry, it will use it.

While WordPress is easy to get set up and running, it doesn’t do the greatest job of explaining to amateurs how to configure it for better security (although it’s getting better).  WordPress doesn’t force you to update it and its plug-ins and it doesn’t force you to have a strong password (although it tries to encourage you to do those things). Because WordPress is so easy to configure and set up, there are an awful lot of WordPress websites out there, and some are running old, compromised versions of plug-ins or core.  Many people are using passwords that aren’t strong enough.  And sometimes, web hosts don’t do the best job of securing their servers against intrusion.

The result of all this is, you’ve heard stories about WordPress sites being hacked.  Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to avoid or at least reduce the possibility of a security breach.  Clockpunk Studios clients have these actions taken for them, mostly, although we don’t dictate anything about your password, so update your passwords to a stronger, longer one if you haven’t already.  Here’s what we do:  nightly off-site backups to restore from in the off-chance a site is compromised, daily updates of core and plug-ins,  and we perform some medium-level difficulty security hardening practices to make your site less tempting to hackers.  A good plug-in to help in doing many of those tasks is the Sucuri Security plug-in.  It’s one we use often ourselves.

So what can you do if you already have  a WordPress website and you want to keep it safe? Use a password that is as strong as possible.  If it’s easy to remember, it’s probably easier to hack.  Look at using a password management tool to help you with all the passwords you have to maintain rather than using the same password everywhere.  Keep your site’s core and plug-ins updated (if we’re not doing that for you).  Finally, if you are really concerned or have been compromised in the past,  you can hire a professional to do a security audit, to put some additional security hardening in place. Clockpunk Studios is happy to help secure WordPress websites against attacks, whether you’re an existing client or a new one.

There’s no 100% fool-proof solution against a site being compromised, and attacks do happen.  They’re usually a pain to recover from, mostly in time spent disinfecting and restoring things that were altered. In the end, we don’t believe that WordPress has a security problem or that it is inherently insecure; the entire internet has a security problem.  With some basic and standard practices, we can do a lot to keep our websites secure against attacks.

The post Does WordPress Have a Security Problem? appeared first on Clockpunk Studios.

Hosting

Self-hosted WordPress is the most powerful and customizable version of working with WordPress. “But I have a WordPress website and it’s free,” you might say. “My website can be found at myname.wordpress.com. That’s WordPress, right?” Yes and no. When we at Clockpunk talk about WordPress, we’re talking about self-hosted WordPress, sometimes referred to as wordpress.org. A subject of much confusion, WordPress.com is a managed software-as-service, kind of like Blogger or Squarespace.  It runs on a modified version of WordPress, and offers a basic free tier. This is one form of WordPress, and using it takes a lot of hassle out of things. However, if you want your own unique, custom design and functionality, you’ll need to move eventually to hosting your own WordPress site.

In order to do this, you must purchase hosting from a hosting provider — basically, you rent space and usage on a server from a company that specializes in hosting websites on their network. Our recommended hosting partner is currently Dreamhost. They have some solid offerings, and in particular, they offer WordPress-tailored hosting called DreamPress, which we find very reliable and fast. If money’s no object, there’s WPEngine too, which is simply amazing to work with, but considerably more expensive, and mostly of interest to businesses that can afford the absolute best. We find DreamPress to be a good balance of quality and price.

You may be tempted to spend less on hosting, perhaps buying something called “shared hosting.” These plans often run around $5-9 dollars a month, but they’re not great for WordPress users. Shared hosting was perfectly fine when a website was made up of static files that didn’t change often, but WordPress is active software, and software requires resources to work. The nature of WordPress is that it dynamically generates pages and content on the server, utilizing memory and processing time. Shared hosting works by cramming hundreds of websites onto the same server, and all these websites then compete for the same limited pool of resources. To stretch their dollar, hosting companies often configure inpidual shared hosting accounts to have very limited resources. Think of a WordPress website as a plant; if you don’t water it and give it sunlight, it won’t grow well. Without good memory and processing resources, WordPress websites will crash and/or run slowly. Stay away from shared hosting if you can. Very small sites with light traffic can get away with it. For our custom-built sites, we highly recommend DreamPress. It runs around $200 a year, and it’s just the most dependable hosting we’ve worked with. Trust us; we’ve tried dozens of hosts and hosting plans in working with our clients.

Total Cost: $200-$300 per year

Domain Names

A domain name is the address by which your website can be reached, and looks something like yourwebsitename.com. Without it, people can’t easily access your site, and would need to type in a string of numbers known as an IP address to reach it. Domain names are an ongoing cost that you’ll need to take into consideration.

You can have and use as many domain names as you want. If you’re really concerned with people copying you, make sure you buy up the .net and .org versions of your domain name as well as .com. There are dozens of domain name registrars that sell domains, just like there are companies that sell hosting (and quite a few that sell both).

You’ve likely already heard of GoDaddy because of their extensive advertising campaigns. Domain name registrars, unlike hosting companies, are mostly the same, so it doesn’t matter much who you use, although we prefer WSM Domains and NameCheap just because they tend to have lower cost prices. Many domain name registrars will try to sell you lots of weird, unnecessary add-ons. The only one with any real value are the “privacy locks” which will prevent the registry from publishing your home address tied to your domain name with a WhoIs look up. If you don’t want people finding your home address, the privacy protection is a useful add-on, and some providers will even offer this without much of a charge.

A note on hosting and domain name registration: We recommend keeping these two services separate  if you want to move your hosting, it’s more difficult if you need to transfer your domain names too. Domain name registrars like to make the process of moving very complicated, ostensibly for security, but sometimes we wonder, given how often transfers seem to fail with unspecified reasons.

Total Cost: $10-$25 per year per domain name

Support and Maintenance Service

WordPress and its plugins often have frequent updates, and if you want to keep your site secure, it’s important to regularly install these updates. Updates add new features but most importantly, they fix security holes found in previous versions of the software. No software is perfect, and over time, very crafty people can find their ways to deface your website; the best defense against this is keeping your site up to date, and regularly backing up your content.

These tasks can be annoyances and it’s easy to forget them. That’s why Clockpunk Studios offers a regular annual maintenance service. We take care of the technical aspects of maintaining a WordPress website so that you can focus on your content.  Even if you hire a kid down the block to do this, you’ll be in better shape than if you set up a WordPress website and forget about it for months at a time. Unfortunately, the Internet moves quickly, and our websites need to be current. WordPress websites can be a commitment, but we believe the benefits they offer outweigh the costs!

Total Cost: $350 per year

We at Clockpunk Studios work hard to keep costs for our clients low, because we are working writers too and we know what writing pays these days. We work with WordPress because we can build websites faster, and with more functionality, than if we built everything from scratch with our own proprietary tools. We like to be up-front with our potential clients that while we keep costs low, there are some fees that you can’t avoid. While these ongoing costs do add up, we still think WordPress is one of the best values for the money. In some cases, a website without reliable hosting or a professional domain name is worse than not having a website at all!

The post What Does it Cost to Keep a WordPress Website Running? appeared first on Clockpunk Studios.