You want a website that’s convenient and time-saving for both you and your customers — one of the best tools for this is an online scheduler. It’s a valuable resource for spas, salons, real estate agents, gyms, and any other business that takes appointments. We just found a great WP online appointment scheduling plugin that’s free and does just that.
Appointy allows your clients to book appointments online, 24×7 and manages all your appointments and calendars. What sets it apart is that unlike most scheduling apps, it doesn’t redirect your client to an external site — users can view availability and schedule appointments right from your homepage. The plugin features a calendar system that shows clients available slots for an entire month and syncs with your Google Calendar or iCal. And it tracks your staff to prevent double bookings as well as allowing you to customize the services and slots offered.
This is a great tool for anyone who wants to make their clients’ lives easier, as well as their own. Plus, Appointy features live support staff and is mobile-friendly for clients and administrators. We think a lot of our clients could benefit, and its worth checking out for any business looking to improve their web presence.
A professional and interactive website can help your restaurant attract customers and positive attention. But as an owner, chef, or manager, you want to spend time doing what you do best – crafting the perfect dining experience for your guests – not writing code or perfecting your website. We just came across a great WP theme designed for restaurants that can help grow your web presence with a sophisticated site.
The Flavour allows you to showcase menus and daily specials, special events, and positive reviews with just a few steps. It’s great because it comes with premade layouts, but also allows you to customize fonts and colors to match your aesthetic. The theme is mobile-ready, which is perfect for potential guests browsing on smartphones. Plus, you can take reservations directly on the site – making it even easier for customers to choose you for their next meal.
The Flavour is fairly simple – a streamlined look and a few well-crafted plugins. But it features every option a restaurant wants on a site. It’s definitely worth checking out for any restaurant manager or owner looking to design a new site or improve an existing one.
When buying or selling a home, people want access to their realtor and relevant information 24/7. So it’s critical that real estate agencies develop a strong web presence, with a site that shows off properties and demonstrates your expertise. We found an WP themes designed especially for real estate that can help you build real estate websites quickly and easily.
wpCasa allows you to craft a professional, functional and completely unique site almost instantly. It’s one of the most customizable themes we’ve found – there are tons of options for color and displays, drag and drop widgets, and edit screens that allow you to tailor each piece to your exact specifications. You can embed images and videos of properties, Google Maps, an automatic language translator, a mortgage calculator – even currency to accept payments online. It was designed by realtors, for realtors – so they’ve addressed all the needs specific to the industry.
We think this theme would be great for real estate agents, but also could be adapted to rental managers, or even vacation property owners. There’s 24 /7 support and constant improvements to the theme, and it’s been called the best real estate theme available. Definitely check this out if you’re building or upgrading your real estate website.
After spending time building, customizing, and perfecting your business’s WordPress site, the last thing you want is to lose your content and settings due to a glitch or system failure. We just found a great inexpensive WP plugin that automatically backs up your entire site to make restoring and archiving easy.
Dubbed the WordPress Time Machine, Snapshot allows you to backup specific pages or your entire site with the click of a button. It’s great because it doesn’t involve clunky server changes or expensive external hardware. Instead, it saves directly to your office server and features the option to save to Dropbox and other online storage services for extra security. You can choose individual pages to back up on the easy toggle menu, or select all files. Plus, the option to schedule automatic weekly, daily, even hourly backups means you never have to worry about remembering to save.
Snapshot is an easy way to make sure your website stays online and continues to work for you – engaging with clients, increasing web presence, attracting new customers. We’d suggest it for personal or business site to save you the headache of rebuilding a site and keep your content safe and secure.
Whether you have a lifestyle, accounting, or legal blog, you always want to make sure you can connect with your audience. Featuring a comments section allows you connect directly with your audience and show your viewers how much you care about their thoughts and experiences. But alongside comments you’ll find spam posts, which are distracting, annoying, and take time to sift through. Wouldn’t you rather save time and the hassle of going through spam comment posts so you can focus writing new content on your website?
The Akismet WordPress plugin is an anti-spam service that filters your comment section and automatically hides posts. It operates by scanning millions of pieces of data from every corner of the internet to keep up with the latest techniques and prevent spammers from using them on your site. It works around the clock and can track in real time how many spam posts it keeps off your site. For businesses, plans start at $5 a month – all you have to do is register and activate the plugin, and Akismet starts filtering and monitoring your comment section immediately.
This is one of the most widely-used and highly-rated WP plugins out there – and it’s clear why. To date, they’ve kept almost 200 billion pieces of spam off of sites, so they’re experts, and their methods are constantly evolving. Definitely a worthwhile plugin for any business that wants to feature comments on their site without inviting spam.
Looking to start an online newspaper, or move your print publication onto your website? We found a WordPress theme called Newspaper that makes it easy.
Aesthetics can make or break your website’s success – it doesn’t matter how great your articles are if their presentation isn’t visually engaging. That’s why Newspaper’s so great. It features five distinct styles (called stacks) that transform your site instantly, and the option to customize every aspect, with over 60 combinations of font, color and layout. Clean lines, crisp photo backgrounds, a balance of text, images, and white space – it looks undeniably cool.
Newspaper also handles three critical aspects of any news site – photos, videos, and ads. You can drag and drop photos into a gallery, directly embed video and audio content, and the theme supports Google Ads and AdSense – an easy way to get revenue by tailoring ads to your viewers.
This is one of the best themes we’ve found, both because it does a lot, and does it all well. For $58 you get access to 24-hour support, but its five-star rating means you probably won’t need it. It’s a way to make your site professional and relevant in just a few clicks.
When planning an event, it’s critical to keep track of every detail to make sure the invitations, registration, ticketing and day-of run smoothly. But it can be hard to integrate complicated systems into your website without hours of coding. We just found a great plug in that can collect attendee data, compile guest lists, and collect payments – it’s perfect for event planners or any firm that relies on hosting events.
Event Espresso allows you to host and manage events directly through your WordPress site. It handles every step of the process, from inviting guests to selling tickets to checking guests in on the day of the event. It allows you to create a custom registration page that collects, organizes, and stores whatever data you need from attendees. You can set up multiple ticketing options, with different dates, times and seating options. When its time to start selling tickets, attendees can pay directly on your WP site, and the plugin handles collecting money and administering taxes. Finally, it sends customized confirmation and reminder emails and includes an option to link directly to guests’ calendars. Besides the lines and lines of code you don’t have to write, Event Espresso actually eliminates a lot of the busywork of event planning.
Event Espresso also gives you the option of add-ons, such as maps, seating charts, and integration with mailchimp and other services. The plugin starts at $99.99, with packages for individuals, corporations and developers and discounts available for non-profits. Plus, it includes live support for troubleshooting and regular upgrades.
There’s a million details that go into planning event, but plug-ins like Event Espresso can handle a lot of them, letting you focus on the big picture.
An informative and professional website is a great way for law firms to differentiate themselves from competition. But it can be hard to know what to include that’s relevant and useful to your clients. We just found a free WordPress plugin, designed specifically for attorneys, that seamlessly integrates useful information directly to your site.
Lawyer Plugin compiles resources including laws, decisions from legislative bodies, government resources, and documents from private libraries – all tailored to your practice areas. The resources are constantly updated, organized, and verified by humans – so your clients can access the most relevant information, without combing through duplicates.
In addition, Lawyer Plugin makes it easy for potential clients to find you. It includes a peer-to-peer lawyer directory, so your firm is listed in a central database. Plus, since you’re featuring high-quality documents and links to reputable sources, your site is more likely to rank higher in search engines – increasing traffic and hopefully, clients.
It’s easy to install – just select up to three practice areas and activate the plugin, and in a few minutes your site is up-to-date and organized. It helps your clients who are looking for accurate information, and can attract new clients on your firm’s professional looking website. And its free – a quick and easy way to make your firm’s site stand out.
Brokerage firms and financial planners can spice up their websites by displaying real-time stock market data on their pages. The add-on of stock data can help investors look out for current and future investments in the market instantaneously. The prospect of coding that kind of constantly refreshed information can seem daunting but luckily we found a solution to add on to your website. We wanted to share two plugins – one free and one paid – that make it easy to embed accurate and relevant stock data directly into your WordPress website.
Show Stock Quotes is a free plugin that lets you display quotes for up to 20 stocks — updated in real time — on your WordPress site. Each quote shows the stock’s price and percent change, with a link directly to the company’s site. The widget pulls the data from Google Finance and it’s updated constantly. There’s also an optional RSS feed.
If you want to display more than 20 stocks, you can just create a workaround by embedding the widget multiple times.
If you want your site to show even more market and stock information, WP Stock Ticker offers a ton of options for $25. It features access to unlimited stock codes and currency pairs, which you can display in a customizable scrolling ticker.
The ticker is easy to set up. Simply enter the stock symbols in the plugin’s settings and choose how it displays. When users click on a specific part of the ticker, it pulls up graphs and charts on that stock’s history. The plugin pulls its data from Yahoo! Finance but then caches it in WordPress so it’s not retrieved from Yahoo every time the page loads.
WP Stock Ticker offers unique customizable options that are easy to navigate. And it’s an easy way to put a professional polish on any WordPress site.
So give us a call or send us a note — we’d love to show you how you can utilize stock quotes on your own website.
As a think tank or research institute, your website needs to convey complex information in a straightforward way. Charts and graphs help a reader analyze and understand what you’re saying and create visual interest. They’re a great addition to any site, but they can also be clunky and require complex coding. We’ve recently found a tool that can help you create, manage and embed charts and graphs directly into your WordPress site.
WordPress Visualizer is a plugin that allows you to build and customize nine types of charts: line, area, bar, column, pie, geo, gauge, candlestick and scatter. It provides really straightforward default settings that allow you to just plug in your data and go. Or, for a more personalized format, you can custom configure options to manipulate precisely how the chart presents information. There are tons of colors and styles to choose from and your charts will embed seamlessly into your site – you just create the chart with the Google Charts app and copy and paste the code into your site.
This plugin uses Google Visualization API – the most widely used visual-making technology – making in compatible with any web browser and the iOS and Android platforms. Anyone with internet access, whether on a computer, iPad or smartphone, will be able to see and understand your graphics.
We think this technology would be great for think tanks that want to focus efforts on collecting and analyzing data, not on coding to make sure the chart shows up.
Keybridge Web specializes in websites for environmental organizations. To learn more, click here.