Riding the Jet Stream to 1 Million Users

Today, we’re excited to share a recent milestone with you: DO now supports 1 million users around the world. We’ve grown with our users, and have worked hard to give them the products they need to run their services without compromising the user experience they’ve come to love. We’re grateful to our users and community, and to the people that have helped us grow and learn along the way. In 2012, DigitalOcean had a modest start. Our staging environment was around 4 or 5 servers, and we had a handful of engineers running the platform. We had two datacenter regions, 200 Droplets deployed, and a vision for what cloud computing could become. But most importantly, we had the support of a community of developers that helped us realize that vision.
A Maiden Voyage
Holding user groups in our early stages really helped us answer key questions about what aspects of the user experience could be improved. We launched our first datacenter, NYC1, and opened up our first international datacenter, AMS1, in January 2012.
Our users have played a huge part in helping us determine where to launch new datacenters to serve them better; in addition to NYC and Amsterdam, we now have
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/15739/riding-the-jet-stream-to-1-million-users

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2017/07/28/riding-the-jet-stream-to-1-million-users/

What does visual search mean for ecommerce in 2017?

Since the early 2010s, visual search has been offering users a novel alternative to keyword-based search results.

But with the sophistication of visual search tools increasing, and tech giants like Google and Microsoft investing heavily in the space, what commercial opportunities does it offer brands today?

Visual search 101

There are two types of visual search. The first compares metadata keywords for similarities (such as when searching an image database like Shutterstock).

The second is known as ‘content-based image retrieval’. This takes the colour, shape and texture of the image and compares it to a database, displaying entries according to similarity.

From a user perspective, this massively simplifies the process of finding products they like the look of. Instead of trying to find the words to describe the object, users can simply take a photo and see relevant results.

Visual search engines: A (very) brief history

The first product to really make use of this technology was ‘Google Goggles’. Released in 2010, it offered some fairly basic image-recognition capabilities. It could register unique objects like books, barcodes, art and landmarks, and provide additional information about them.

It also had the ability to understand and store text in an image – such as a photo of a business card. However, it couldn’t recognize general instances of objects, like trees, animals or items of clothing.

CamFind took the next step, offering an app where users could take photos of any object and see additional information alongside shopping results. My tests (featuring our beautiful office plant) yielded impressively accurate related images and web results.

More importantly for brands, it offers advertising based on the content of the image. However, despite the early offering, the app has yet to achieve widespread adoption.

A Pinterest-ing development

A newer player in the visual search arena, image-focused platform Pinterest has what CamFind doesn’t – engaged users. In fact, it reached 150m monthly users in 2016, 70m of which are in the US with a 60:40 split women to men.

So what do people use Pinterest for? Ben Silbermann, its CEO and co-founder, summed it up in a recent blog post:

“As a Pinner once said to me, “Pinterest is for yourself, not your selfies”—I love that. Pinterest is more of a personal tool than a social one. People don’t come to see what their friends are doing. (There are lots of other great places out there for that!) Instead, they come to Pinterest to find ideas to try, figure out which ones they love, and learn a little bit about themselves in the process.”

In other words, Pinterest is designed for discovery. Users are there to look for products and ideas, not to socialize. Which makes it inherently brand-friendly. In fact, 93% of Pinners said they use Pinterest to plan for purchases, and 87% said they’d bought something because of interest. Adverts are therefore less disruptive in this context than platforms like Facebook and Twitter, where users are focused on socializing, not searching.

Pinterest took their search functionality to the next level in February 2017 with an update offering users three new features:

Shop the Look allowed users to pick just one part of an image they were interested in to explore – like a hat or a pair of shoes.

Related Ideas gives users the ability to explore a tangent based on a single pin. For example, if I were interested in hideously garish jackets, I might click ‘more’ and see a collection of equally tasteless items.

Pinterest Lens was the heavyweight feature of this release. Linking to the functionality displayed in Shop the Look, it allowed users to take photos on their smartphone and see Pins that looked similar to the object displayed.

In practice, this meant a user might see a chair they were interested in purchasing, take a photo, and find similar styles – in exactly the same way as CamFind.

Pinterest Lens today

What does it mean for ecommerce brands?

Visual search engines have the potential to offer a butter-smooth customer journey – with just a few taps between snapping a picture of something and having it in a basket and checking out. Pinterest took a big step towards that in May this year, announcing they would be connecting their visual search functionality to Promoted Pins – allowing advertisers to get in front of users searching visually by surfacing adverts in the ‘Instant Ideas’ and the ‘More like this’ sections.

For retail brands with established Pinterest strategies like Target, Nordstrom, Walgreens and Lululemon, this is welcome news, as it presents a novel opportunity for brands to connect with users looking to purchase products.

Product images can be featured in visual search results

Nearly 2 million people Pin product-rich pins every day. The platform even offers the ability to include prices and other data on pins, which helps drive further engagement. Furthermore, it has the highest average order value of any major social platform at $50, and caters heavily to users on mobile (orders from mobile devices increased from 67% to 80% between 2013-2015).

But while Pinterest may have led the way in terms of visual search, it isn’t alone. Google and Bing have both jumped on the trend with Lens-equivalent products in the last year. Both Google Lens and Bing Visual Search (really, Microsoft? That’s the best you have?) function in an almost identical way to Pinterest Lens. Examples from Bing’s blog post on the product even show it being applied in the same contexts – picking out elements of a domestic scene and displaying shopping results.

One interesting question for ecommerce brands to answer will be how to optimize product images for these kinds of results.

Google Lens, announced at Google’s I/O conference in May to much furore, pitches itself as a tool to help users understand the world. By accessing Google’s vast knowledge base, the app can do things like identify objects, and connect to your WiFi automatically by snapping the code on the box.

Of course, this has a commercial application as well. One of the use cases highlighted by Google CEO Sundar Pichai was photographing a business storefront and having the Google Local result pop up, replete with reviews, menus and contact details.

The key feature here is the ability to connecting a picture taken with an action. It doesn’t take too much to imagine how brands might be able to use this functionality in interesting and engaging ways – for example, booking event tickets directly from an advert, as demonstrated at I/O:

The future

Many marketers think we’re on the brink of a revolution when it comes to search. The growing popularity of voice search is arguably an indicator that consumers are moving away from keyword-based search and towards more intuitive methods.

It’s too soon to write off the medium entirely, of course – keywords are still by the far the easiest way to access most information. But visual search, along with voice, are certainly still useful additions to the roster of tools we might use to access information on the internet.

Ecommerce brands would be wise to keep close tabs on the progress of visual search tools; those that are prepared will have a significant competitive advance over those that aren’t.

This post was originally published on our sister site, ClickZ, and has been reproduced here for the enjoyment of our audience on Search Engine Watch.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/07/28/what-does-visual-search-mean-for-ecommerce-in-2017/

20 Best BuddyPress Themes for Your WordPress Website

Are you looking for the best WordPress themes for BuddPress? BuddyPress is a sister project of WordPress. It allows you to build an online social network on top of your WordPress website. In this article, we have hand-picked some of the best BuddyPress themes for your WordPress website.

Building Your Online Community with BuddyPress and WordPress

WordPress is already favored by more than 27% of all websites on the internet. That’s all because of the ease of use and flexibility it offers.

BuddyPress is a sister project of WordPress. It allows you to add an online community with social networking features to your WordPress site.

It is available as a WordPress plugin which means you need a self-hosted WordPress.org site to use it.

To start a self-hosted WordPress.org website, you’ll need to sign up with a WordPress hosting company and get a domain name.

We recommend using Bluehost. They are one of the largest hosting companies in the world and an official WordPress recommended hosting service.

After buying hosting, you can go on and install WordPress. For step by step instructions see our how to start a WordPress blog guide.

Next, you need to install BuddyPress plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

That being said, let’s take a look at some of the best WordPress themes for BuddyPress that’ll make your website look great.

Note: This list contains both free and paid themes and all of them are mobile responsive.

1. Black Flag

Black Flag is a modern WordPress theme compatible with BuddyPress. Suitable for content-rich online communities with a magazine / news style homepage. It comes with variety of layouts and styles, smart widgets with flexible sidebars, and a dedicated videos page.

It includes a reviews section as well, which allows users on your website to easily add reviews of products. It also offers built-in support for bbPress and WooCommerce out of the box.

2. Cool Stuff

Cool Stuff is a clean modern WordPress theme for BuddyPress, magazine, news, and blog websites. It features a modern homepage with a traditional two-column blog layout. It includes built-in sections to add filterable portfolio, services, events, and members.

It is super flexible and comes with awesome features like social sharing, image slider, contact form, and Google Maps support.

3. Credence

Credence is a flexible multipurpose WordPress theme suitable for BuddyPress, magazine, news, or business websites. It has multiple layouts and a premium drag and drop page builder allowing you to create pages from scratch with no coding skills.

It is translation ready and can be used to create multilingual websites. You can also use it to add an online store using WooCommerce.

4. Checkout

If you want to sell digital downloads on your BuddyPress website, then you’ll like Checkout. It is a BuddyPress compatible WordPress theme designed specifically to work with Easy Digital Downloads, one of the best WordPress eCommerce plugins in the market.

Checkout has a beautiful dashboard for vendors or sellers, a portfolio section, and beautiful typography using Typekit fonts. It comes with a getting started page and works with several popular free WordPress plugins.

5. Noozbeat

Noozbeat is a modern WordPress magazine theme compatible with BuddyPress. It features a magazine layout focusing on keeping users engaged with your content. It has unlimited color choices, multiple category layouts, and ready to use advertising spots.

Inside you’ll also find custom widgets for social networking, Twitter, Instagram, content discovery, and more. It has a custom theme options panel allowing you to turn elements on or off, add your logo, change backgrounds, and more.

6. No Offense

No Offense is a WordPress theme for psychology clinics, therapists, and mental health websites. It supports BuddyPress to easily create your own online community. Featuring a modern business website layout for the homepage, it has flexible options offering lots of customization choices.

It has various shortcodes, 1-click demo installer, Font Awesome icons, and custom theme options panel. It is WooCommerce ready and can be used to create multilingual websites as well.

7. The Core

The Core is a bundle of 20 WordPress themes packed inside one super flexible theme. All of these themes are fully compatible with BuddyPress. It includes a powerful integrated page builder allowing you to easily create your own layouts if you need.

It has unlimited colors, unlimited sidebars, several custom post types, WooCommerce support, and more. It is easy to use and has a custom theme options panel to help you easily setup your website.

8. Game On

Do you want to build a fun arcade gaming community with BuddyPress? Check out Game On. It is a WordPress theme for gaming websites with BuddyPress support. It has integrated options to display ads on progress bars during game load and on the game page.

It has flexible customization options with different colors and Google Fonts. It also comes with an step by step theme setup guide and extensive documentation.

9. The Columnist

The Columnist is a free WordPress theme for magazine, news, blogs, bbPress and BuddyPress websites. It comes with different layout choices for homepage, archives, single pages, bbPress and BuddyPress.

It includes a responsive slider and four color schemes. Content can be displayed in up to four-column layout.

10. NewsBlok

Need a powerful theme for your content rich news or magazine site? NewsBlok is theme for magazine and news websites with multiple layouts and several styles. It is fully compatible with BuddyPress and WooCommerce.

It comes with a 1-click demo installer, custom widgets, reviews section, and live theme customizer support.

11. Games Zone

As the name suggests Game Zone is a WordPress theme for online gaming communities. You can easily use it to build your own gaming community with BuddyPress. It has sections for reviews, articles, events, members, and more.

It also offers multiple layout choices, shortcodes, custom widgets, and many more customization options. It has 2 sliders, a simple theme options panel, and 1-click demo website installer.

12. Streamline

If video content plays an important role in your BuddyPress community, then checkout Streamline. It is a WordPress theme designed for magazine/news websites with beautiful video embeds.

It uses customizer for all theme options, which allows you to setup your website with live preview. It has custom widgets for featured posts carousel, newsletter widget, videos, and more. You can also change theme colors, backgrounds, layout, and fonts to make it truly yours.

13. Sauron

Sauron is a free multipurpose WordPress theme that can be used to build to any kind of WordPress site. It comes ready for not BuddyPress, bbPress, WooCommerce, and WPML for multilingual websites.

Among other features, it has a full-width posts grid, front page builder, fullscreen lightbox slideshow, layout editor, typography options with Google fonts and social sharing options. It is easy to setup and child theme friendly.

14. IndiGamer

IndiGamer is another great option for gaming websites. With its dark color scheme and futuristic look it gives your site a unique look.

You can further customize this look to make it yours with custom logo, background, homepage layouts, and page templates. It is easy to setup and supports all popular WordPress page builders like Beaver Builder, Elementor, Divi, and more.

15. Arcade Basic

Arcade Basic is a free WordPress theme with flexible settings to be used as a multipurpose theme. It is compatible with BuddyPres, WooCommerce, and bbPress. You can use the theme customizer to add your own header image, page layout, site width, and more.

It has a sticky floating navigation menu at top, social media menu, and two column layout for blog pages.

16. Compass

Compass is a customizable and sophisticated WordPress theme. Suitable for blogs, magazines, and business websites, Compass is also fully compatible with BuddyPress. It has a fully-widgetized homepage layout, which means you can add custom widgets to setup your homepage.

Homepage uses featured images and your content categories to beautifully curate your content. It has a mobile friendly slider and all theme options can be setup in live customizer.

17. Monochrome

If you prefer minimalist style in your design, then you’ll love Monochrome. It features beautiful typography and spacious layout for a cleaner and sophisticated look.

It is built on top of the rock solid foundation of Genesis framework. It also uses minimalism in its approach to theme options, which are fewer but have everything you’ll need.

18. Sufia

Sufia is another great option for content rich WordPress websites. It is compatible with BuddyPress and includes features like Ajax based custom login form, user avatar display in menu bar, user submitted posts, and authors list.

It has widgetized layout with 29 custom widgets. You just need to drag and drop them to create your own layout. It has 10 unique homepages, 5 custom panels, and 7 header styles. This gives you enough options to create a unique look for your website.

19. Modules

Modules is a modern and stylish WordPress theme that is truly flexible and easy to use. It comes with 16 ready-made websites that you can install with the click of a button. You can then replace the content with your own to get started.

You’ll also like modules that come with the theme. These are content blocks and design elements that you can just drag and drop to build your pages. Modules is fully compatible with BuddyPress, WooCommerce, and all major WordPress plugins.

20. Titan

Most content rich websites need a layout that can showcase their best content. Titan does this well. It is a WordPress magazine/news theme with multiple layouts, styles, and several content discovery features.

It is fully compatible with BuddyPress, WooCommerce, and other popular WordPress plugins. It has several page templates, and you can change layout for each page easily. Theme setup is quite simple and pain free with tons of cool features for you to try on your website.

We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress themes for BuddyPress. You may also want to see our ultimate step by step guide on how to boost WordPress speed and performance.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post 20 Best BuddyPress Themes for Your WordPress Website appeared first on WPBeginner.

source http://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/best-buddypress-themes-for-your-wordpress-website/

GoDaddy Launches WordPress Premium Support To Provide Small Businesses With 24×7 Expertise

New service combines GoDaddy’s best-in-class customer support with round-the-clock access to expert developers, helping small businesses fix and optimize their WordPress sites SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., July 26, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — GoDaddy Inc. (NYSE: GDDY), the world’s largest cloud platform dedicated to small, independent ventures, today announced WP Premium Support, a new support offering that provides unparalleled support and a new level of access to WordPress expertise. This offering helps small businesses fix, update and optimize their WordPress sites more quickly and conveniently than ever before. WP Premium Support gives customers access to a large team of on-call WordPress developers to provide expert guidance on resolving site issues and boosting performance at the drop of a hat.
GoDaddy is launching WP Premium Support to ensure that every GoDaddy customer with a WordPress site has the help they need to make the most of their online presence. WP Premium Support provides access to WordPress experts and GoDaddy’s acclaimed 24x7x365 customer support team to help members fix bugs quickly, improve site security, reduce bounce rate, increase site traffic and speed, and assist with Theme
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/15738/godaddy-launches-wordpress-premium-support-to-provide-small-businesses-with-24×7-expertise

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2017/07/28/godaddy-launches-wordpress-premium-support-to-provide-small-businesses-with-24x7-expertise/

Learn from WP Buffs how to set your maintenance business apart

Like with any business it’s important to stand out, and with more WordPress maintenance businesses thriving, I wanted to find out what does it take to be different, rather how to get clients to pick you. Joe Howard from WP Buffs has already shared some insightful information on how to get started in the world of freelancing, and I wanted to find out how WP Buffs came about, what’s unique about them, what tools they use, and how they position themselves in the WordPress community. Joe, who if you haven’t met is the friendliest person around, made sure I had all of the answers I was looking for. How did you first get started with WordPress, and what led you to starting up a WordPress website technical support business?
The first startup I ever got involved with was a very early-stage SEO agency. I was brought on as the Director of Operations. The title sounds impressive, but when you’re the first employee of the company, it really just means you do some of everything.
We ran digital marketing campaigns for clients across a range of different industries. But it turns out along with digital marketing services, people wanted new websites too! We decided to meet that
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/15736/learn-from-wp-buffs-how-to-set-your-maintenance-business-apart

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2017/07/27/learn-from-wp-buffs-how-to-set-your-maintenance-business-apart/

On Theme Onboarding in WordPress

One of the actions that raise a lot of questions over for clients over at WP ServicePoint is the moment when a client decides to switch to a new design, a new theme. It’s one of those actions that is surprisingly poor handled by the vast majority of the themes out there. A few of the questions I saw in our mail queue made it very obvious that there are themes out there that really shouldn’t be handled by new to average WordPress users. That’s a bold statement, right? Well, yes it is, but it’s also true. And yes, some of those themes were the kind that tries to solve every damn website layout solution out there in just one theme, but truth be told, there were some themes that were in itself simple enough, but required just too many steps to make them look anything like the demo. And that’s just not okay.
A while ago my son wrote about his general onboarding experience as a WordPress newbie. In the second step, he describes the experience of activating a theme for the first time. What was very clear to me from that exercise is that that particular onboarding experience is just really poor. We should be doing better. And since we’ve started building
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/15737/on-theme-onboarding-in-wordpress

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2017/07/27/on-theme-onboarding-in-wordpress/

Inclusivity starts with awareness – WordCamp Europe 2018

On behalf of the WCEU organizing team, I would like to thank our muslim community members, and Asif Rahman in particular, for bringing us greater awareness, so that we can continue to improve and accomplish our mission of making WordCamp Europe truly accessible and inclusive. The choice of dates for our annual event starts with the application process, when local communities apply to host future editions of WordCamp Europe, and is shaped by a number of factors, including:
The venue’s availability.
A hard requirement to be at least 5 months apart from WordCamp US.
Local bank holidays and school vacation periods.
WordCamp traditionally falling on a Friday-Saturday.
Whereas we were aware of the period of Ramadan, which has fallen around our event dates for the last two years, we were ignorant of the fact that the dates we had chosen for our upcoming event June 14-16, 2018, fall more specifically on Eid al-Fitr, a special day of observance.
After learning of this, we went back to the venue and tried to change weekends. We deeply regret that we were not able to at this late date, and offer our sincere apologies to all those who will not be able to attend in 2018 because of this conflict.
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/15735/inclusivity-starts-with-awareness-wordcamp-europe-2018

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2017/07/27/inclusivity-starts-with-awareness-wordcamp-europe-2018/