Create the Perfect Barbershop Website with WordPress and the Jetpack Plugin

Posted on January 7, 2019 by Zach Wills

Whether you’re an established barber, are fresh out of school, or are just pulling together a business plan, creating an effective and beautiful barbershop website can be critical to your professional success. Let’s talk about standing out from the crowd, landing new clients, and extending your social reach by creating a website for your salon services with WordPress and the Jetpack plugin.

Desk with various barber utilities such as heairbrush, combs, etc.

Finding the perfect theme

Selecting an effective theme is the first step in the site design process, as it defines your brand’s overall tone.

You can browse more than 100 themes in the Jetpack theme showcase. If you don’t find exactly what you’re looking for, you can upgrade your plan for a wider theme selection that also come with enhanced features.

Whether you’re looking for a retro, 19th-century design (complete with a rotating barbershop pole) or a modern aesthetic, there’s a theme out there that’s perfect for your barbershop website. Once you find one that has the features you need, customize it to align with your color scheme and the layout you desire. After the customization process is completed, ensure that your site looks great across devices — while Jetpack themes are responsive, it never hurts to double-check that your images are properly sized for a smooth viewing experience. Help visitors get a feel for your business, which will make them more likely to book appointments.

Showcasing your skills through fast-loading images

Haircuts are all about the look, so your website should feature photos of your clients’ fresh cuts, your staff members, and your shop. With Jetpack, you can serve up your photos quickly and display them in a visually compelling way.

Jetpack’s Site Accelerator serves your photos through its global network, keeping load times low and reducing the burden on your hosting server. Your images will be automatically resized so that they fit perfectly with your theme, giving you an extra speed and efficiency boost.

This isn’t where the image optimizations end, however. Users expect websites to load extremely fast. Fortunately, with Lazy Images your site is ready to meet their speedy demands. Does it sound strange that “laziness” gets you speed? Here’s how it works: if one of your site pages contains images scattered throughout, they are typically all loaded at the same time. Your readers, however, likely want to start scrolling down a page as quickly as possible, and they don’t immediately need to view images that appear towards the bottom of that page. With Lazy Images, your site only loads the images when they need to be seen: once they scroll into view on a page.

Reaching customers with contact forms

Answering questions and responding to feedback are great ways to engage with customers. Those who ask questions and have them answered might be more likely to become customers, and anyone who leaves feedback — even if it’s critical — shows they are emotionally invested in your business.

To enable your customers to get in touch, have their questions answered, and their voices heard, consider adding a contact form to your pages or posts — it only takes seconds with the new Jetpack Form block. Each submitted form is delivered to the email address of your choice, and you can also view all replies within the Feedback section of your site.

After users submit a contact form, your site can redirect them to a “Thank You” page, where you can further incentivize interested individuals or appease critical feedback with special discounts. By adding a line of code to your theme’s functions.php file, you can add a customized message once your form has been successfully submitted.

Extending your reach with social media

Now that you have a theme for your site, images that load quickly, and contact forms to facilitate interaction, you can spread the word through social media integration. Help site visitors find your social media pages with ease in case they want to connect and share your posts to their own social channels. The Social Media Icons widget places links to your social media accounts on your sidebar. You can give viewers access to your YouTube or Vimeo clips, provide styling tips on Facebook or Twitter, or direct them to many other platforms where you maintain a presence, like Instagram.

You can also promote your Facebook page with the Facebook Page Plugin widget. This tool displays your profile photo on your website, as well as the number of “likes” your page has received. You can even configure this widget to display your latest Facebook posts on your website.

The possibilities are endless

The goal of any website is to make a business look appealing in order to attract customers and encourage audience engagement. For a business like a barbershop, which relies on sharp visuals and social buzz, Jetpack’s tools bring you one step closer to accomplishing your objectives.


Posted in Grow | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Run a Successful Sweepstakes on Your WordPress Website

Posted on January 5, 2019 by Antony Agnel

Sweepstakes, contests, and giveaways are often used by bloggers and marketers as ways to bolster mailing lists, boost user engagement, and increase exposure through social shares. Making sure that these campaigns are easy for you to manage and simple for participants to understand and enter will ensure that they run smoothly and achieve their purpose.

Let’s review a few tips and tool recommendations to help you effectively run a sweepstakes on your WordPress website, positioning you to reap the benefits and make the most out of your contest.

Running a sweepstakes has its perks

Using your site as a platform to run sweepstakes can increase the number of people that you typically reach. This is particularly true if your readership growth is a bit stagnant. Sweepstakes and contests can attract more eyeballs to your content, giving you the chance to reward a few of your readers for the time they spend exploring your site and sharing your posts. Since sweepstakes usually involve sharing a post on social media, your readers will be doing most of the sweepstakes marketing for you. Plus, if you’re giving away a product that you make and sell as the sweepstakes prize, your exposure will be even greater, as the winner might post and share photos of themselves using your product.

Don’t think that the benefits of sweepstakes, contests, and giveaways are fleeting. If your content remains relevant, it’s likely that participants will still follow your blog (or your social media accounts) even after your promotion ends.

Sweepstakes best practices

If this is your first time conducting this kind of promotion, here are a few tips that can help you run it smoothly.

Highlight your sweepstakes with its own page

If you’re a frequent blogger and you announce a sweepstakes within a regular post, it may get buried among your other posts. Instead, create a separate page with the pertinent contest details.

You can display your sweepstakes promotion within a widget. Use Widget Visibility to control which pages display your sweepstakes listing, and to hide other widgets that might distract from it. This should make your sweepstakes more visible to casual site visitors who stumble upon your page. Add it to your site’s primary navigation menu, display a message on the sidebar of your blog’s content page, or add a call-to-action button below your latest posts asking readers to enter your sweepstakes. This can save time that you might spend promoting and explaining the sweepstakes rules, and will make it easier for participants to navigate to, bookmark, and share your sweepstakes listing.

Be forthcoming

This rule applies to both your entry process and your intentions for running a sweepstakes on your WordPress website. If you make participants jump through too many hoops, you will likely end up with fewer entrants, which limits your promotion’s potential reach.

If you’re asking participants to submit personal information (like their names and email addresses to validate their entries), inform them about how you will be using their data. For example, if you’re conducting a sweepstakes to collect email addresses for your next newsletter marketing campaign, tell participants that they will be added to your list of email subscribers (and that they can opt out at any time). This is also applicable if you’re using Contact Forms to collect sweepstakes information.

Practice with a dry run

From contest rules to the entry process, any small hiccup could stall your sweepstakes’ success. Get ahead of these issues by testing your landing page with a small group of people before going live. You might reach out to willing participants on social media or ask a small group within your family-and-friends network to test your initial entry form.

Ask your testers how you might improve the wording of your sweepstakes rules, how long the process took them to complete, and how they felt as they were submitting their entries. Request that they submit any feedback using a contact form placed on your site, or through one of your social media channels. Take their feedback to heart when revising your sweepstakes entry form before sharing it with the general public.

Sweepstakes plugins

With Jetpack’s suite of promotional features, most of your bases are already covered; these include Social Media Icons that complement any sharing components of your sweepstakes, Publicize to automate your contest-related posts, and the Milestone Widget to create a countdown for the number of days remaining until the winner is announced. Combine these with a plugin like Pick Giveaway Winner, Contests by Rewards Fuel, or Social Polls to complete your contest toolkit.

A small sweepstakes can create a big buzz

Running sweepstakes on your website can introduce your content to new readers, increase your site traffic, and boost engagement. With a bit of promotion and the tips and tools mentioned above, you can mobilize your followers to do the marketing for you.


Posted in Grow | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Let Jetpack Support You in Creating a School Website

Posted on January 3, 2019 by Rachel McCollin

If you’re a teacher, principal, or educator, you know how important creating a school website has become — some countries even require them. Parents visit the websites of their children’s schools to find information, students access their assignments, and prospective students and community members can learn about upcoming events.

Creating a school website requires more than just setting up a landing page. It will serve as a hub for communications, marketing, and resources.

Let’s explore the Jetpack features that can help educators create their school with WordPress, while ensuring they serve as assets for students, families, and communities.

Use photos to commemorate and promote events

Images can play two important roles on a school website:

  • They’re an effective way for parents to see what’s happening at school and how their children are performing. Images from award ceremonies, trips, and stage performances help students celebrate their successes as well as commemorate their milestones.
  • Images show off your school’s strengths to prospective parents who might enroll their children in the future. Photos of classroom learning and students enjoying activities on campus can bolster a positive image of your school and faculty.

Jetpack offers tools that can present your photos professionally and dynamically. When you create a gallery (have you tried the recently launched Gallery block in the WordPress Editor? You should!), you can specify how images will be displayed, from the number of columns to whether thumbnails are cropped or not.

Share updates to engage with your community

More and more schools are becoming active on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. They use these outlets to share updates and content with their communities. Although effective, this can become a time-consuming labor of love when done manually.

Publicize lets you automatically share new content to your social media channels as soon as it’s published. Just connect to your social media accounts and it will happen automatically. You can also tailor each post to your liking, or have Jetpack create descriptions based on the content of your posts. If you haven’t connected any social accounts yet, no worries — you can do that with a few clicks from the WordPress Editor’s sidebar — once you click Publish once, part of the confirmation process includes the option to add the networks you wish.

You can also encourage students and proud parents to share your school’s posts on their own social media accounts. Jetpack’s Social Sharing feature adds convenient buttons to each post, allowing visitors to re-share them in a matter of seconds.

If a robust social media presence isn’t the right choice for your particular school, keep in mind that you can still implement Social Sharing features so that your visitors can share your content to their personal feeds.

Create a calendar to keep everyone on schedule

Whether they’re looking for winter vacation dates, the summer school session period, or the graduation ceremony start time, your students, their parents, and even your own faculty members will turn to your school website for answers.

With the Upcoming Events Widget, you can add a list of forthcoming events along the sidebar or footer of every page of your site. This makes it easier for people to find what they’re looking for.

If you link this widget to a Google calendar, it will automatically display the most up-to-date details.

Use site security to protect your data

To protect your students and their families, the security of school data should be taken very seriously. European schools were affected by GDPR legislation, and elsewhere, there are regulations in place to ensure that the data held by schools is stored and used appropriately.

Jetpack offers a number of security features to keep your site secure and accessible. These tools include downtime monitoring, automatic plugin updates, and malware blocking. You can also further enhance your site security with backups, spam protection, and security scanning, all features you can enjoy with a paid Jetpack plan.

Revitalize your school website

Your school website is a valuable asset. It can help you communicate with students and parents, allow you to share memories and accomplishments, and even attract new students. With Jetpack’s powerful features, you can enhance your school website, making it work even harder for your community.

Posted in Grow | Leave a comment

If You’re Looking to Generate More Leads in 2019, Make the Most of Jetpack’s New Form Block

Posted on December 31, 2018 by Rachel McCollin

When people visit your website, they should do more than just browse a page or two and move along to another site. You should give them the opportunity to become a customer or a fan.

That first glimpse of your website is just the beginning of your relationship with a site visitor. The goal is to encourage them to keep coming back, buy your products, or use your services while becoming an advocate for your brand.

With a new year mere hours away, let’s focus on how to generate leads — potential future customers — by allowing visitors to subscribe to your mailing list and website, and share tips for incentivizing them to do so in 2019 and beyond.

Generate leads to build a loyal fanbase

It’s tempting to assume that your website will become a selling powerhouse all on its own — that if you run an eCommerce store, people will browse through your products and services and make purchases right away.

Things don’t always work that way. People are unlikely to make a purchase the very first time they come into contact with an online business. According to Pew Research Center, 86% of American shoppers believe that it’s important to be able to compare prices from different sellers before making a purchase. Therefore, depending on the nature and price of your product or service, it could take a number of interactions before a shopper is convinced to buy something from your site.

To maintain a relationship with a potential customer after they navigate away from your site, you’ll want to request their contact details so that you can follow up and address any concerns or questions they might have. Alternatively, you might want to tell them about other products or services they might not have seen the first time they’d visited your site.

If you gather leads and use them effectively, you can gradually develop relationships with prospective customers. In turn, these relationships can lead to sales. You can also nurture these relationships over time, encouraging shoppers to return to your site for repeat visits while recommending your products and services to their friends.

Using forms to gather leads

One of the most effective ways to gather leads from your website is by using a contact form. Contact forms let you collect site visitor information (like email addresses), so that you can contact prospective customers to answer any questions or let them know about your services. With the new Form block — available to anyone with the latest version of Jetpack — creating a contact form on any post or page has never been easier. You can customize it to your needs, and even include a checkbox so visitors can confirm that they agree to receive emails from your business. Once they’ve opted in, send emails about your offerings, specials, or promotions.

Curious to see how a form might look on your site? Here’s how you will see it in the WordPress Editor:

Once you publish a page or post containing the Form block above, this is what visitors will see on your site:

Adding a form to a widget

You don’t need to limit your contact forms to posts and pages. To add your form to a widget (so that you can display it in your footer, sidebar, or any other widget area in your theme), follow the instructions on creating a simple Contact Form Shortcode and enter the resulting code into a Text Widget.

Adding contact form to widget

Gathering leads through subscriptions

Another popular method for gathering leads is encouraging visitors to subscribe to your site. This way, they’ll receive notifications whenever you post new content. Users can subscribe through the Subscriptions Widget.

The Jetpack subscribe widget

This ensures that your site visitors won’t miss your latest posts. When they receive notifications that you’ve published new content, they’ll be more likely to keep you top-of-mind when they’re ready to make purchases.

Incentivize your leads to become customers

Some lead forms are more effective than others. How do you encourage as many people as possible to complete yours? Here are some tips:

  • Offer leads something in return for filling out a form or subscribing to your site. This might take the form of a discount, a free download, or exclusive content. Whatever you choose, follow up and deliver it immediately.
  • Keep the number of form fields to a minimum. People may scoff at a form that takes a long time to complete. If all you really need is an email address and a checkbox, include only these items.
  • Ensure that your form is mobile-friendly. Your theme is most likely responsive, but it never hurts to check how your form appears on a mobile device.
  • Play by the rules. When someone submits a form, they will either be redirected to a custom page within your site, or will receive a confirmation message (depending on which option you choose). On your site page or within the message, tell subscribers what they’ll be receiving, how often you’ll be contacting them, and remind them that they can unsubscribe at any time.

Communicating with new leads

After you secure new leads, don’t forget to follow up with them. The moments following a signup or subscription are among those when your new leads are most receptive to hearing from you.

Linking Jetpack to an automated email service like Mailchimp will position you to send subscribers friendly emails right away, including information about your products and details around the freebie or discount code that you initially offered as an incentive.

If a user subscribed to your site content, make sure you’re publishing regularly so they don’t forget about you.

Gather leads to boost sales

Website lead generation enables you to build a loyal following of customers and fans. Gathering leads and effectively following up on them will help you win over more customers in, increase repeat site visits, and acquire a loyal fanbase. If you follow the tips above, 2019 can be the year your website can become the powerful selling tool that it’s always had the potential to be.


Posted in Learn | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Three Website Design Considerations for Tattoo Shop Owners

Posted on December 29, 2018 by Maddy Osman

If you own a tattoo shop, it’s important to make it easy for clients to find you, learn about your craft and experience, and get in touch with you.

Here’s how Jetpack can help simplify a few of your most important website design considerations when building an online presence for your tattoo shop.

1. Pick a theme that aligns with your brand

One of the most fundamental goals of website design is effectively communicating your brand to site visitors. With Jetpack, you’ll have access to more than 100 professional themes to choose from, and additional 200 premium themes if you’re on a Jetpack Professional plan.

Jetpack themes

With a basic understanding of WordPress and the Customizer, you can configure themes to your liking and communicate your brand whether or not you decide to work with a web designer. Empowered with access to hundreds of customizable designs with Jetpack, your fully-functional website will soon attract potential clients.

In addition to a visually stunning theme, incorporate photo elements into your site. Display photos of your clients’ finished tattoos. Feature each of your shop’s artists, with their own respective galleries of work. Prospective clients can browse through these examples to choose an artist who excels in a particular kind of design, like shading or line work.

2. Make appointments easy to schedule

If your site visitors aren’t sure how to get in touch with you, it can prove difficult to convert them into paying clients. With this in mind, the best websites make it convenient for people to connect with the businesses they represent.

The easiest way to drive people to your business? Make it simple for customers to book or request appointments. A call to action with a generic company email address isn’t enough. It’s better to create a Contact Form that collects all the information you need.

With Jetpack’s new Form block, the process of adding contact forms has become even quicker and smoother than before.

Jetpack form block

With Jetpack’s Form block, you can add forms to any post or page on your website — not just the Contact page.

While you’re at it, why not add and configure a Contact Info Widget? This tool displays relevant business information like your address, hours of operation, phone number, and an interactive Google Map. Putting all of this information in one place can make it that much easier for prospective clients to schedule a time to visit your shop.

3. Use descriptive menus for smooth site navigation

If you’re thinking about improving a future client’s experience on your site, you’ll also want to consider your site navigation. Be sure to label your menus based on words that customers can easily understand.

For example, instead of “News,” you may want to use the “Blog” to label your section of up-to-date information and relevant articles that cover tattoo industry trends. “News” isn’t technically incorrect, but it might just be a term that people associate less frequently with a tattoo shop.

Similarly, if you want to direct people to make inquiries, it might be more appropriate to label a section of your website as “Contact Us,” as opposed to “Inquiries.” If your business is casual and friendly, make sure the language you use on your site matches it.

Your designs can be intricate, but keep your website simple

A simple website with a great user experience can outperform a gorgeous but confusing website. These three website design considerations can help to streamline your efforts and improve your clients’ online experiences with your tattoo business.


Posted in Innovate | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Improve Site Navigation for a Superior User Experience

Posted on December 27, 2018 by Antony Agnel

If you regularly publish relevant content, but visitors leave your site once they finish reading an article, you might want to consider your user experience.

Your readers likely want to learn more about the topic at hand, but if your site is missing a structured navigation menu, they might find it hard to locate the content they’re looking for. This might confuse them, prompting visitors to find an alternative site to use in the future. Ultimately, this can result in a higher bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who leave a site after viewing only one page) and could negatively impact your search rankings — and your business’s bottom line.

It’s a vicious cycle, and the best way to break it is by improving your site navigation to create a better user experience (UX). Positive experiences convince site visitors to stay longer and eventually return to read more of your content.

Let’s review how having intuitive site navigation can help to improve your user experience and decrease your bounce rate.

Site navigation matters

Site navigation helps to structure your website and serves as a high-level index for your content. Through your navigation menus, visitors can quickly locate the content they’re looking for. This encourages them to explore your site for longer periods of time, all the while building familiarity and trust with your brand.

A great navigation menu can also help first-time site visitors understand what your website is about, all within seconds of landing on your page. Adding post categories and drop-down subcategories to your navigation menu also helps your audience understand how your content is grouped.

On top of making your website more accessible to readers, transparent site navigation can also give you an advantage over competitors in terms of search engine optimization (SEO). Navigation considerations are among Google’s most important ranking factors.

Improving your site navigation for a better UX

Below are a few bases you’ll want to cover to provide visitors and search engines alike with a way to swiftly navigate your site and content.

1. Only display the most relevant categories

Even if your site features hundreds of well-written posts that are meticulously filed under dozens of different categories, don’t display every single one within your menu. Those extra categories will clutter your menus, overpopulating your site navigation. This might diminish your user experience by overwhelming readers with too many options, defeating the purpose of navigation menus altogether.

Jetpack's navigation menu includes the categories: Product Tour, Pricing, Support, and Blog

Instead, display only the categories that are the most important to your readers and use descriptive keywords that are in line with your SEO strategy. For example, a website for avid hikers might display the following categories: “Hiking News,” “Trail Maps,” and “Connect with Other Hikers.”

2. Limit your menu items

Having too many menu items within your navigation menu doesn’t help your user experience either. According to cognitive psychologist George A. Miller, most people can only retain about seven items within their short-term memories at any given time. So, try to limit your navigation menu to a maximum of seven items.

3. Test your menus for accessibility across devices

Make sure your menu is clear, intuitive, and visible across any device that a visitor might be using to view your content. Due to the various design elements that make up a website, side navigation menu icons can disappear into the background, or become unclickable when viewed on a mobile device. This increases the likelihood that visitors leave your website without getting what they came for.

To ensure that your website doesn’t fall victim to this design flaw, test it out using a tool such as Google’s Material Design Resizer so that you can get ahead of the problem before it impacts your bounce rate. You can also make use of Jetpack’s mobile friendly theme that optimizes sites for use across various screen sizes — or simply use a newer theme, as virtually all modern themes are responsive.

4. Create primary and secondary menus

In addition to displaying too many menu items, another common mistake is adding too many menus to your website. It’s advisable to create up to two menus — having more than two might confuse site visitors. Nowadays, many site owners use primary navigation menus for the more popular areas of their websites (such as “Blog” pages or product categories), and secondary menus for important but less-frequently referenced information (such as “About” pages or contact information).

5. Incorporate design elements

Many site owners will link their logo back to their homepage, place menus in locations where readers expect to see them (such as a header or sidebar), organize menu items according to their site structures and content hierarchies, and add search boxes near their navigation menus.

Jetpack gives you the advantage of being able to round out your navigation system with Site Breadcrumbs to streamline the structure of your navigation system, and a Social Menu to display links to social media profiles to further refine your user experience and increase engagement across various channels.

Social Menu allows site owners to create a new menu location, used to display links to Social Media Profiles

Improve your site navigation to give visitors what they want

It’s important to align your site navigation with what your visitors are looking for. It also plays a role in how you want readers to interact with your website.

If this is your first time creating a navigation menu, or you’re reworking existing menus, implement these techniques to refine the process, supporting visitors as they engage with your content.


Posted in Innovate | Leave a comment

Support Your Airbnb Listing with a Property Rental Website

Posted on December 23, 2018 by Lance Cleveland

Furniture and towels are in place, the cleaning is done, and your A‌i‌r‌b‌n‌b‌ profile is complete. Your rental property is ready to accept reservations — but you’re limited to whatever information the rental service allows you to share with prospective guests.

When you list a property to attract guests, you’re selling an experience. You want to convey a feeling that is often hard to channel within the confines of an application or third-party service.

Let’s review how keeping a property rental website to complement an Airbnb listing can support your vacation home by providing more images and information that set you apart as a host. Your website can play a significant role in convincing prospective guests to rule out competing listings and book their stays with you.

Receive more views with a property rental website

You may be thinking, “If I’m already listed on Airbnb, why is creating a separate property rental website necessary?”

Having a website to share your rental property with prospective renters can add to (or even replace) those services by empowering you to provide more detailed information about your place, including maps, additional images, and resources that your guests might find extremely useful, like a contact form that allows them to reach out directly if they have specific questions or concerns.

Helpful hosts get favorable reviews

The best way to get and maintain five-star ratings on rental websites is to be a reliable host. Being attentive and keeping your property in good shape is just the beginning. Be proactive by providing any information that your temporary tenants might need. When you do that, you show that you’re an approachable host who is there to answer questions and support guests.

A website is a great place to house and manage all of this information. While many rental properties share instructions and house rules via email prior to guests’ arrival, the very best hosts also share website URLs for their properties. By providing guests with a website full of resources, they can address the most frequently asked questions and supply far more than a list of rules. Going above and beyond with a website will set the tone for your guests’ experience, and might reflect even better on you once it’s time for them to leave reviews.

Build out your listing with thoughtful details

Besides house rules and the always-crucial Wi-Fi password, consider building out the character of your listing by adding a few extra touches.

  • Are you renting out a historic or interesting property? Include an “About Our House” page that explains what makes your property unique.
  • Guests might be interested in learning about your story as well — so introduce yourself and provide some fun facts about your background. This is where you can go beyond the two-line introduction that a third-party rental service allows.
  • Add a guestbook plugin to let guests share experiences and tell stories about the good times they had at your property. This simultaneously provides you with useful testimonials to feature on your site down the road (with permission from the authors) and convinces future prospective guests to make reservations.
  • Share additional photos so your listing stands out. The orange sunset falling below the mountains, a historic hiking route, or even the cocktail lounge a few blocks away — many properties’ biggest selling point is their proximity to other attractions. Rental services prefer that you only share photos of your listing, but with your own website, you can share as many additional photos as you want. When you show them to visitors through a powerful content delivery network like Jetpack’s, your site will stay lightning-fast.
  • Share exciting local events with prospective renters. The farmer’s market held every Thursday afternoon might not be news to you, but it’ll be a first for your guests — so be sure to tell them about it. You can display any local events worth sharing with the Upcoming Events Widget.
  • Showcase popular local destinations — list your favorite hangouts, the best cafe in town, or a legendary brunch spot. Is there a scenic beach nearby that nobody knows about? Use a map block so your guests can plan their trips.

Websites are the perfect platforms to organize and present this wealth of information. As an added bonus, your posts can double as advertisements if you share them to your social media channels with Publicize.

Better ratings, more reservations, increased revenue

At the end of the day, having your own property rental website positions you to achieve one very important thing: providing superior guest experiences. Better experiences lead to positive ratings for your property, which bring in more reservations. If every weekend is booked months in advance, you earn that much more income.

Posted in Innovate | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Build a Bar Website With Great Themes and Jetpack Features

Posted on December 21, 2018 by Jonathan Bossenger

If you own a bar, it’s important to have a strong online presence that can showcase your establishment to potential patrons. Researching WordPress bar themes is a great first step. To ensure that your bar website stands out from the rest, you’ll also need a clear vision of what you want to present to visitors, and how best to present it.

Let’s review some key elements to consider when planning your bar website, beginning with how to choose from the many WordPress bar themes. Then, we’ll take a look at some of the functionalities that a bar website should have.

Before getting started

It’s always a good idea to begin with a dash of inspiration, which can come from almost anywhere. One great way to get inspired is by browsing the websites of other businesses within your industry.

While researching other websites, think about the information they present to visitors. For a bar or lounge website, you’ll likely see the different drinks available, the food menu, and options for event hosting. They might also try to channel the bar’s atmosphere. Once you’ve done some research, prepare a list of the items that you want to showcase on your site. Once you choose a theme, you’ll be able to display them in an appealing way specific to your own establishment.

Hiring a professional to photograph your bar and menu items isn’t a bad idea if it fits within your budget. This will help to shape the design of your website and inform your theme selection process.

Finding the right theme

You already have a multitude of themes to choose from (including commercial theme options); Jetpack users also have access to additional starter themes (and even more options with a paid plan).

Jetpack themes

When browsing through themes, it’s important to consider the ambiance of your bar. Is it formal, or laid-back and relaxed? Understanding your customer base and their preferences plays a big role in customizing your website’s appearance. If you use a formal tone online, but your bar is usually frequented by patrons looking to relax and unwind after a hard day at work, you’re going to be targeting the wrong audience with your website. This could lead to disappointed, misled, or confused customers.

Finding the right theme to convey your bar’s style and brand doesn’t always happen on the first try. To find a theme that meets your needs, try looking for one that was designed with similar businesses in mind. Searching for restaurant, cafe, or hotel themes might yield the result you’re looking for.

Put customers first by prioritizing functionality

When building a website, many business owners only focus on aesthetics. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t always take user experience into account. Great user experiences play a major role in turning an online visitor into a paying customer. If your website is difficult to navigate or use, you risk seeing your visitors leave your pages with no intention of returning. It’s important, then, to prioritize what your visitors will see and do on your website. To that end, here are a few features to include on your bar’s site to better serve future patrons.

Social sharing

Social media platforms help small businesses advertise on a budget. Word-of-mouth comes in the form of online reviews and recommendations, so you’ll want to make your site content shareable across different social networks.

Publicize automatically shares your content on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms. Not only can you post new content straight from your WordPress site, you can also enable sharing buttons that allow visitors to introduce your content, your website, and your business to their own followers. Since bars are great places to meet up with friends, it makes sense to maintain a presence on the platforms where your customers and their friends connect.

Search engine optimization

Regardless of the size of your business, you can ensure your content is search-engine optimized (SEO) to help it rank well on relevant queries. Plugins like Yoast SEO or All in One SEO Pack allow site owners to apply solid SEO practices that make their businesses easier to discover.

For information about combining these plugins, check out Moz’s “Beginner Guide to SEO” to ensure that you’re covering every base.

Event management

When you host beer festivals, wine tastings, and other bar-friendly events you give customers reasons to step into your establishment. One of the best places to advertise events is on your website.

Upcoming Events is a Jetpack widget that provides a quick way to display forthcoming events on your site. To power this feature, you just need a calendar application that supports an iCalendar URL, like Google Calendar. Once you sync your calendar to the Upcoming Events widget, you can display events across your website.

Alternatively, if you aren’t a Google Calendar user, you can choose to display events using a plugin like The Events Calendar. This tool allows users to create and manage events from within the WordPress dashboard.

Contact information

The physical location of your bar is an extremely important detail to feature on your website. How else will customers find you? To assist, Jetpack offers a Contact Info widget that will display your location, hours of operation, contact information, and an optional Google Map view so that first-time visitors can quickly locate your bar while out and about.

Cheers! You’re almost done

Once you decide on your site’s functionality and settle on a theme, it will be time to build your bar’s website. While it may seem like a daunting task at first, with the right theme, plugins, and knowledge, the possibilities are endless.



Posted in Learn | Leave a comment

Create Online Courses With Jetpack to Share Your Expertise

Posted on December 17, 2018 by Zach Wills

Jetpack is a popular pick for WordPress users because it offers enhanced functionalities and can be used for most purposes, ranging from blogging to e-commerce. One thing that you may not have considered, however, is creating and offering online courses through your site.

Let’s explore how to offer online courses through your Jetpack site so that you can share valuable lessons while profiting from your expertise.

What to consider before getting started

At bare minimum, you’ll need a few hours of video content to get started with creating an online course. If you’re camera shy, don’t worry, you can use lecture slides as well.

It’s also important to consider the layout of your course. How many parts will you offer? Will you include written content to supplement your videos? How will you grade your students on course completion?

After you’ve given the logistics behind your course some thought, consider going a step further by integrating a forum where students can answer each other’s questions and give each other feedback. This can save you from having to address each issue personally. Other helpful features to include are a “FAQ” page and a “Contact” page complete with a form so that students can contact you directly.

Plugins to support your online course

What’s a teacher without resources? Here are a few tools that can help you deliver a curriculum.

Learning management: Sensei

Plugins are what gives WordPress its amazing versatility, as you can download tools that will enable you to add virtually any feature to your site. There are a few plugins that are specifically designed to help you create an online course. These are called learning management systems (LMS), and they make laying out your content much easier. One LMS that’s gotten a lot of attention is Sensei.

Sensei logo and heading

Sensei helps to make your courses attractive, easy to navigate, and user-friendly. Once installed, you can create online courses, write detailed lessons, and add quizzes. Its reporting feature lets you see how many people are enrolled in your course, and you can recognize those who complete your curriculum with personalized certificates.

The features don’t stop there, though. If you offer multiple courses and you’re looking for more advanced functionalities, Sensei even allows you to set lesson and course pre-requisites. This means that users will need to take and pass a certain lesson or course in order to advance to the next one.

Tuition: WooCommerce

Sensei is an extension of the WooCommerce plugin, a popular e-commerce option that’s known for being well-supported and easy to use. If you decide to charge a fee for your course, you can create a paid membership option with WooCommerce to integrate popular payment gateways, like PayPal.

Video lectures: Jetpack’s Video Storage

Screenshot of Jetpack video player

You’ll need a way to manage and organize your videos, especially if your course features many hours of content. Use Jetpack’s video storage functionality to upload videos from your computer directly to Jetpack’s servers, instead of storing the videos on your host’s server. This saves you storage space, and allows your site to load a lot faster. Those with Premium or Professional plans can upload an unlimited amount of video content and deliver it quickly and seamlessly to viewers with Jetpack’s video content delivery network (CDN).

Attract long-time learners

Once your course is live and ready to be taken, you’ll need to attract students. It’s important to promote your course so that it reaches a wide audience. Send out an email reminder (if you have a mailing list), and post about it on social media. If you have a budget, consider using paid ads, as they’re impactful ways to bring in the exact type of traffic you’re looking for.

You should also consider providing written transcripts of your videos, as an alternative content type may improve your search engine optimization and will certainly add to the quality of your curriculum. Additionally, it offers an alternative to an audio course. Those who are hearing-impaired, or prefer to read lesson plans instead of viewing video content, might use this content type instead.

Offer courses with ease

You don’t need to become a WordPress expert to sell your expertise — all you need is Sensei, WooCommerce, and Jetpack to help you create online courses that will deliver your passion and knowledge to the world.

Do you offer online courses through your website? How do you promote them? Share with our readers in the comments below!

Posted in Innovate | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

  • Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive news and updates from Jetpack!

    Join 104,182 other followers

  • Our most popular posts

  • Browse by topic

    • Unlimited Video Hosting

    Jetpack Premium now provides unlimited use of our video CDN. Save on hosting storage and bandwidth costs by streaming fast, ad-free video from our global network.

    Learn More