In this tutorial I will show how to set up a multi-level drop-down menu in Joomla 3.3 system. The tutorial is compatible with other Joomla versions as well, but the screenshot has been taken from 3.3 version.

Please note that some templates may not support drop-down menus, but most new designs have this feature integrated. If you are looking for responsive templates with drop-down menu please check out our free joomla templates. If your current joomla template does not support multi-level menus and don’t want to change your design you can use our free responsive menu module. The process to set up the menu is the same.

Login to the Joomla backend and create a new menu category

Add the necessary details and save your new menu category.

Next, go to the Menu Manager, look for your newly created menu and select it. You will see that there is no menu item added to this menu yet, so you will have to create them. Simply click on New button to create a new menu point.

Now you are into editing/creating mode of your firs menu item. Add a menu title and select what type of menu you want to create. The menu title will be the visible link on the website, so consider this when naming your menus. You can select from various types of menus, but for this tutorial we will choose the most common menu type that menu Joomla user use: Single Article menu.

The next step is to select a page (I assume you have already created at least one article, otherwise you will have to create one before adding a page to the menu) from your existing articles.

In the Options tab you have lots of configuration options for the page like show or hide author of the article, category, title, make the title clickable, and more. The option Use Global will use the global setting that can be set up in the Global Configuration of your website. This feature allows you to use same setting for all articles, so if you want all your articles to have the same look, leave all options for Global use.

There are other options you can set up for the menu like adding a small icon next to your menu or setting up meta-data for the page, but we will ignore these in this article.

Save the menu and repeat the above steps until you have created all necessary menu items.

Now, to create a sub-menu, is almost the same like creating the main menu level, with small difference that you have to choose a parent menu for it.

After you finish adding all the menu items, you will have to create a menu module that will display your menu on the website.

Create a Menu module, set up the necessary options, but most importantly the Show sub-menu item option should be Yes and don’t forget to choose a module position where you want to display the menu.

By saving the module you are done and your menu can now be visualized on the live website. Hope this tutorial will help lots newbie Joomla users, and as always, if have any questions, please use the comment system below.

The post How to create a multi-level drop-down menu in Joomla appeared first on The Grue.

While consumers do more and more research online before purchasing a product or a service, it is essential for every business to have a website. Companies that neglect their online presence typically are losing business. Having a website is not enough; it is important that the website can be found on Google and other search engines, so the website is actually receiving traffic and it is exposed to potential customers. Also very important thing is the way how the content of the website is presented to the visitors, how easy the navigation is and how quickly the consumer realizes what the website is about. The first five seconds are very critical for the users, so you want to create a very good impression from the start. Make sure your website looks professional and offer a great user experience.

In this article we will show you five most important things you should consider implementing on your website in 2015. This study was made by Bowen Media and they also created a very nice info graphic that will be attached at the end of this page.

Let’s analyze what are the top five trends for web design in year 2015.

Mobile Friendly (Responsive) Website Design

The concept of having a responsive website is not new at all, but still I find at least one website every day that look ugly on my phone and have to zoom in and out to see the content. It annoys me very fast and usually I end up on another website which provides me the same info but in a better way. If most of the users act like me, you will be losing lots of customers if your website is not mobile friendly, but let’s see what the statistics are saying:

• 67% of consumers are more likely to purchase on a mobile friendly website
• According to a survey by Google, 48% of users say that if a website that does not look good on a smart-phone it feels like that company just don’t care about its business
• A company whose website is not compatible with mobile phones will not be recommended by 57% of consumers.

Interactive Scrolling – new user experience

Parallax and infinite scrolling are the two types of interactive scrolling techniques used on websites. Parallax scrolling helps to create 3D effects by using layers of images, showcase products in 3D, create 3D timeline, guide visitors along a path to call to action. It is very eye catching and attracts user’s attention. The infinite scrolling technique improves the loading time of the pages, thanks to the fact the content is loaded only when the user approach the bottom of the page. This technique adds a lot to the user experience, allowing them to access more content without additional effort (such as clicking and tapping).

Flat Web Design – how it works

The characteristics of the flat web design are the bright colors, crisp edges, and big open space between elements, clean and professional look, easy to use by the end user. Flat designs can be easily converted to responsive designs and usually have a faster loading time. According to a survey of web professionals, 68% said that flat design is not only a temporary trend, but it will stay for long.

Single Page Websites

The concept of a one page website is very simple: all content in one page. It is true that this type of design is not for every website, but there are cases when single page site will do the best job. These types of sites are very easy to navigate, usually scrolling is the only option you can do, the content is very compact loaded with images, videos, it focuses more on visual rather than text and works great on mobile.

Clean and Simple Layouts

Studies shows that 90% of the information sent to the brain is visual, that is why 40% of people will respond better to visual information rather than text. Another proven fact is that the quality of the images of a product plays a very big role in converting the visitor into client. It is recommended to make the layout as simple as possible, remove all unnecessary elements from your site, make the navigation as simple as possible and add more images than text. Adding bigger headlines and custom typography is also a good way to grab more attention.

Many online marketers are saying that text is for search engines and not for people, this can be true, but my personal opinion is that sometimes the visual is not enough to explain something; you will have to write a longer story.

So as I promised, here is the infographic that explains you the above mentioned trends in attractive visual way:

The post Top 5 Web Design Trends of 2015 appeared first on The Grue.

The administrator or as called in Joomla 3.x, the Super User is able to change anything on the website, can add or delete users, reset other user’s password, and can change own password as well. But what happens if the admin forgets the password, username or email address, or somehow an unauthorized person (hacker) manages to reset and change admin login details using the software’s vulnerability?

The process my be very simple for a regular user, but in case of Super users the process is different. For users with administrator privileges the password can’t be reset with a password request to your email address. When you try to reset the password of the admin a notification will come along saying you have to contact other Super User or use an alternative method.

Well if you are the only admin of your website, you will have to change the password in the database. Most hosting providers use phpMyAdmin for database management, so I will show you how to get a new password via this tool. Login to the hosting account where your site is hosted and click the phpMyAdmin icon. This will redirect you to the databases.

If you don’t know which is the database used for your site, you can look it up in the configuration.php file in the root folder (will need to access your site via FTP or check the file in the file manager of your hosting account).

Find the database of your Joomla website in phpMyAdmin and look for the table _users. The table may have a prefix and it may look like this: j3x_users or any other variation, but just ignore that and click on the table.

The next step to find the and edit the details of Super User.

The password field will contain the old password in encrypted format, so you will want to delete that and set the function column to MD5. After this insert your new password (just your normal none encrypted strong password) and save the table.

If you did everything right, now you should be able to login to your site with the Super User account.

The post How to Reset Admin Password in Joomla 3.x appeared first on The Grue.

Joomla is a powerful and easy to use system, however when it comes to search engine friendly websites, it is a bit tricky to get it going. In this tutorial I will show you how to enable search engine friendly urls and how to remove the index.php and other unwanted codes from the url with no need of installing any plugin or component.

You should know that it is important to consider activating sef urls on your Joomla site not only because it looks a lot better, but it also helps in search engine rankings. This was Google can read your site easier and categorize it better in different search term results. Please not that the following tutorial works on Apache servers only and the screenshots have been taken from Joomla 3.x version. In older Joomla versions the steps are similar but minor differences.

Let’s start and see how to turn an ugly url into search and user friendly url.

First login to the administration panel and go to

In the “Site tab” you will have to do some changes for the SEO Settings. Use the “Yes” option for Search Engine Friendly URLs and URL rewriting. If the URL rewriting is not working, probably your web host did not activate the mod_rewrite module on the Apache server. Contact them to make these changes for you.

Now find the htaccess.txt file in the main folder where your site is installed and rename it to .htaccess

You are almost done, but there is one more little thing to do, to remove the index.php from the urls. You will have to edit the .htaccess file and find the following line:

# RewriteBase /

Remove the “#” from the line and if you have installed your joomla site in a sub-folder (ie: http://yoursite.com/joomla ), insert the sub-folder name after the “/”

RewriteBase /joomla

If joomla is installed in the root folder, you don’t need to add any sub directory to the code, just use it like this:

RewriteBase /

Now check your site and see the effects of the changes.

The post How to activate SEF URLs in Joomla 3.x and remove index.php appeared first on The Grue.

In this article I will show you what are the top 10, probably most important thing to do after installing WordPress to your website. Is is quite a long read, but I really hope it will help a lot of you to properly set up a WordPress site.

1. Change Website Title and Description

Website title and description is a very important thing to set up properly, because this will be indexed and displayed in search engines like Google. The title tells the search engine what is your site about, so you should use related text and keywords to your site content when setting it up.

On this page you can also set up the time zone where you or your readers are located and change date format if required.

2. Configure Reading Settings

By default, WordPress will display the newest ten posts on the homepage. You can change how many posts you want to show on the main page or change the homepage to a static page, that will display a single page you choose. I would not recommend having more than 10 posts on your home page because it slows down your website.

3. Configure Discussion Settings

Managing discussion on your site could be difficulty if you have a lot of readers and they like to interact with the content or with each other. My suggestion is to manually activate each comment to avoid any problems and filter out spam 100%. If the manual approval is difficulty because of huge number of comments, you can activate the feature that only registered users can comment.

Probably you will want to deactivate email notification for new comments. At the start it is fun to receive an email when a new user commented on your site, but when you are getting hundreds of comments daily, you probably don’t want to get an email from your site every minute.

Having hundreds of comments on a page will significantly slow down the loading time. In this situation you can enable the feature to break the comment area in different pages and choose how many comments you want to display on one page.

4. Configure Permalink Settings

Unfortunately by default WordPress does not have a very good URL structure. For better search engine indexing and navigation purposes you will want to change the permalinks.

As you can see, there are couple of options you can choose from, but which you should use for your website? If your website will be a blog, probably you will want to use a permalink structure that has a date in it. If you are running a presentation website, the best choice is to use the “Post name” format for your link structure. You can also choose custom structure and create the links as you like.

5. Install your favorite WordPress Theme

WordPress comes with few already installed themes to the system. You can use one of them, however to have a different look for your website, you can choose from the thousands of free and commercial designs available.

6. Install necessary Plugins

Anti-Spam Plugin – it is not enough to manually moderate the comments you receive on your website. You definitely want a plugin that can detect spam comments. By default there is a plugin installed to the system, called Akismet, which is a great anti-spam tool, however it requires an API to activate it. It is also limited to few thousands of comments, and when it reaches the maximum number of comments it will shut down the whole commenting system and will have to purchase the premium version. If you are looking for a free and reliable anti spam plugin, I highly recommend this.

SEO Plugin – if you are serious about your website, and would like to have all the control in your hands when it comes to on page optimization, your should install the seo plugin developed by Yoast. It is available for free and there is also a premium version available, where you will get extra features and premium support. The Yoast plugin has all the features that is needed to optimize your website for search engines, from custom meta and title possibility to on page analysis, anything you can think of.

Social Sharing Plugin – you think social is not so important  at the start?  Website users not only want to share good content with their friends but some times they just like or re-tweet a page just to have it bookmarked so later they can access it again. So consider adding a plugin that enables your users to share your website easily.

Contact Plugin – you want to receive emails from your website visitors; if you don’t want to display any email address on your website, you can use a contact form plugin. For this you can use the Contact Form 7 plugin. This tool allows you to create custom contact form with custom fields. It has been translated to multiple languages and supports different captcha services and spam filtering. So far the plugin was downloaded over 25 million times.

Backup Plugin – it is possible that a server crash or a website hacking may destroy your hard work you put into building your site and uploading content. You want to be able to restore your files and database at any time if something goes wrong. For this reason it is recommended to use a backup plugin, that allows you to schedule backups and have it stored outside of your server. BackWPUp is a great plugin that will back-up your website and will push it to your Dropbox account or to another server you set up.

Cache Plugin – to speed up your website and reduce server load, you will need a caching plugin. It is recommended to only activate it when you are ready with website building/editing, when you start adding content. Probably the best choice for caching your website is the W3 Total Cache plugin.

7. Add Categories, Pages and Posts

If you choose not to install any sample data, most likely you will have one post, one page and one category on your site. At this point you probably know the exact structure of your website and the pages you want to add. If your website is a blog your will want to create multiple categories for different topics. You will also want to create few pages like terms and conditions, contact page, about page, and others.

8. Setup Menus

Now, after you added the pages you needed, it is time to create the menus. For this, first you will have to create a menu category and only after that it is possible to add menus items. If you have multiple menus on your site, you can have multiple menu categories as well with separate menu items. After creating the menu, it is necessary to assign it to a menu location. Usually this is a pre-designed position in the theme you are using.

9. Configure Widgets

Widgets are the boxes you display in sidebars, footer area and pre-made positions on your website. By default there are lots of available widgets like custom text, category display, latest post widget, search box, custom menu, calendar, and others. With simple drag and drop movement you can easily activate and deactivate the widgets you want to use. If you need other widgets and functionality on your website, such as slideshow or ad boxes, you can install new widgets just like you would install a wordpress plugin.

10. Delete all unused Themes and Plugins

During your website setup you probably installed to test multiple plugins and themes and you decided to not use all of them. It is fact that each plugin and theme use up a small portion of the disk space and database. You want to minimize as much as possible your website’s size and loading time. So it is recommended to delete all unused, not only because they may slow down your website, but they also represent a risk factor in your website’s vulnerability. Why should you bother updating unused plugins or why risk your site to get hacked because of an unused and outdated plugin? Just get rid of everything that you don’t need.

If you have any question or you want to add something to the list, please let me know in the comments.

The post Top 10 things to do after installing WordPress appeared first on The Grue.

The favicon is the small image that is displayed in the browser bar and tabs when you open a page. What is the use of the favicon? It helps to identify a certain website when having multiple open tabs in the web browser or accessing a website from the bookmarks.

Joomla has it own favicon and by default each new Joomla installation will have the same icon. If you are using a third party template, probably the designer has included its own favicon in the template and your site will display that image. Here I will show you how to change that small image from the browser tab:

1. Find or create the image you would like to use. Favicons are not very detailed images and usually are square or rounded.

2. Resize the image to 16×16 or 32×32 pixels and convert it to .ico file. With this tool http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/ your image will be automatically resized and converted to the required file format.

3. Save the files to your computer and make sure the file is called favicon.ico

4. Using FTP or a file manager tool, upload the image to the following folder of your website:

joomla_root/templates/your-default-template/

and overwrite the old file.

Please note that most of the browsers use caching to speed up loading time of the website, and some elements such as images and favicon are stored and loaded on your local computer. This means that your new favicon will not show right after you upload it, even refreshing the page couple of times. Probably you will need wait couple of minutes or delete browser cache and restart the browser to see the change.

The post How to change favicon for Joomla website appeared first on The Grue.

TheGrue Menu is a free responsive menu module for Joomla that allows you to create stunning, colorful menus on your website. This menu module has been tested on all major web browsers and mobile devices to make sure that your website will look professional to anyone who visit it. The module comes with lots of in-built features like custom color choice for menu background and links, 20 different font styles to choose from, option to have rounded or straight corners. Want a unique styled menu with extreme color combinations? TheGrue Menu module is what you are looking for.

To use this free module, you have to download it first and install it to your Joomla site. After installation go to Extensions > Module Manager, find the module TheGrue Menu and start setting it up.

The setup is very easy, here is a screenshot of the available parameters:

The module allows you to have multiple levels of menus with dorp-down animation and fully customize it for your design needs. You can change background and link colors for main and sub menus and also can choose from the most popular font styles from Google font directory.

By default the menu has rounded corners of 3 pixels, this can be increased or can set to 0 (zero) to deactivate.

The jQuery library is deactivated by default, because most of Joomla templates and Joomla 3.x system already has jQuery integrated. Loading this library multiple times it will cause javascript conflicts, stopping jquery plugins to work. So make sure that jQuery is loaded only once on your website.

Note: we tested this module with several templates, to make sure it works perfectly. However there are cases when the template styling overrides the module styling and could break the design of the module. To be sure that the module is not overlapping with any design element of your template, create a new module position, dedicated to this module.

If you find any bug or have ideas how to improve this module, please leave a comment on this page.

The post Responsive Menu Module for Joomla appeared first on The Grue.

We are happy to announce that all our templates has been tested and updated to work with the latest Joomla 3.4.1 version.

We have also updated the FontAwesome font pack to 4.3.0 version.

Check out our Joomla Templates here!

The post Joomla 3.4 Template Updates appeared first on The Grue.

WordPress is an easy to use and very flexible website builder. We call it a CMS (content management system), because it not only helps to create amazing website but one of its main features is to manage website content. Via its admin panel, the user is able to create new pages, add text, upload images, embed videos and have full control over the incoming comments.

With WordPress is simple and easy to build any type of website. In this article I will show you how to create a photography portfolio website without the necessity of knowing computer programming.

Choose a good WordPress host for your photography website

Choosing a good web hosting plan is not easy. If you don’t have any experience with hosting and websites, probably you don’t know how important is to get a reliable hosting provider. If you choose the wrong hosting company, you can end up losing your website, and while your site is your main source of clients, you want to keep your site online at all costs. Please avoid even thinking to try out free hosting service. It is just waste of time; if you are not a hoppy, but a full-time photographer, I suggest getting a professional hosting plan.

For WordPress hosting, I highly recommend BlueHost. The company, has a very good reputation among webmasters, and has been the official hosting partner of WordPress.org since 2005. With the one-click installation tool, offered by BlueHost, you can install WordPress to your domain in just couple of minutes.

The installation process is very easy, here is a quick video for you to watch and learn how to install WordPress to your BlueHost web hosting account.

Get a lightweight photographer WordPress theme

Once you have finished installing WordPress to your website and accessed the admin panel, it is time to change the default theme. To do this, you will have to access the Appearance > Themes menu and search for themes. There are lots of free and premium themes you can choose from. Here is a list of the best premium photography wordpress themes:

Tripod is a premium responsive WordPress theme that was created for professional photography websites. It has a nice and simple minimalist design and the integrated drag-and-drop page builder allows you to create the layout that fits best your design needs.

Hiker was designed for photographers. It is agrid based theme, focusing on displaying photos at its best. This theme also comes with drag and drop builder which allows you to customize the homepage, create your portfolio and arrange your blog posts in the way you want it. It is fully responsive, so mobile users will also enjoy browsing your photography portfolio.

Moda focuses on showcasing your photos in a very elegant way. Thein-built heroic gallery allows you to create and arrange your photos into galleries. It has 5 different amazing gallery layouts: slideshow, carousel, landscape grid, square grid and portrait grid. Moda is mobile friendly, delivering optimized images forsmart phone users, making your website load faster on smaller screen devices.

Setup your photography portfolio

The above mentioned themes include page builder and galleries which makes your job much easier. But if you choose a theme that does not has these features included, you will need to search for a photography portfolio builder plugin. In the WordPress.org plugin showcase you can find lots of free plugins that will enable you to build your photography portfolio. Beside this you will need other plugins that will help your website load faster and have higher rankings in search engines. Here is a list of the plugins you will need for your photography website:

• Yoast SEO plugin – helps you optimize your pages
• W3Cache – speeds up your website by caching pages and images
• Contact Form 7 – to create custom contact form on your site
• Really Simple Captcha – to include a spam detection filter in the contact form
• Google Analytics Plugin – to include your Google tracking code to monitor website traffic

These are the most needed plugins; certainly you can add more if you wish to integrate other functionalities to your site, however do not over commit, because having lots of plugins activated on your site can slow it down.

You will also need to set up pages, menus and widget to your website. It is important to have an “about us” where you showcase your equipment, the people you have worked for, your motivation, etc. The “contact us” page is also very important, here you should put a contact form and also list your email address and phone number, allowing your potential customers get in touch with you quickly. It is good to also list your prices, because this way you can avoid dealing with customers who does not have the budget to hire you. Finally, you should create the menus and setup the widgets to the sidebar (if necessary).

Check your website frequently and update plugins and WordPress core when there is a new version available. Outdated plugins are easy target for hackers, which is not something you want to deal with.

Finalizing your photography website

After you finished adding content you should spend a good amount of time testing the website. More eyes can see more, so send your website’s address to your friends, and ask them to take a look to your site and search for eventually errors and report those to you. Be open to suggestions and do not hesitate to make modifications to your site. Once finished, the website does not require much attention; however it is beneficial for your business and also for search engines to add new content once in a while.

Are you ready to get started building your photography website?

Sing up with Bluehost, register your free domain, install WordPress, get the theme you like, upload your photos and content and start getting clients. Good luck!

The post How to build a photography website with WordPress? appeared first on The Grue.

While navigating on the internet, you will find lots of different advertisements and offers on most of the websites you visit. By clicking or purchasing products or services through ads, someone will earn a commission. You can also make money easily by building and maintaining a website.

In this article I will talk about the possibilities to monetize your website in multiple ways. Whatever you are running a hobby blog or you want to make a living online by managing one or multiple websites, you can generate income.

Some of the following strategies involve a lot of work and time while others are relative passive money makers. Choose the strategy that fits you the best.

Make money through affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular strategies that are used for website monetization. Most of big companies offer affiliate programs, through their own website or trough affiliate networks, so there are many products and services you can advertise.

By signing up to an affiliate program, you will get all the advertising materials you need to promote or recommend that specific product. When someone buys through your affiliate link, you will receive a commission.

Depending on what affiliate program you chose, the commissions can vary a lot: for digital products you can receive up to 70% while for services you can get even more. Selling goods is not as profitable, these will pay you around 4%-10% of the purchase amount.

How to find products to promote?

Amazon Associates – through this program you will be able to advertise and recommend products from amazon.com website and earn a commission of up to 10%

Commission Junction – is a huge affiliate network where you can choose from many different companies and products.

ShareASale – is also a big affiliate network, it is a good alternative to the above mentioned CJ.

PPC a good strategy for passive income

Google, one of the largest companies in the world makes money from PPC (pay per click) advertisement. Google Adsense is the platform that provides the advertisement materials and can be used by both published and advertisers.

To make money using Adsense, you will need to sign up as a publisher, while you will be providing the content and Google will provide with the relevant ads. The system is simple: lots of publishers sing up to this program and buy advertisement; publishers will place a code to their website, where these ads will be displayed through the Adsense program. When a website user clicks on the ads, you will be credited for that click. You can receive around $0.3-$10 per click, depending on the niche of your site. A website with high traffic can make hundreds or even thousands a month.

Please keep in mind that Adsense have very strict terms of service: it is very hard to be accepted, it is forbidden to click the ads on your own site, content should be unique and high quality and lot of other restrictions. Make sure you read their TOS carefully and you are up to date with the latest changes. Although it is hard to get started with Adsense, it is one of the best ways to passively generate very good income from your website.

Sell advertisement space on your website

To make some quick cash, you can sell banner space in the unused areas of your website. The amount of payment you can get for a banner highly depends on traffic of your website. For this you will get paid up front and the contracts are usually made for 30 days.

To find advertisers you can join different ad networks such as BuySellAds, or you can do some self-promotion on your own website, and expect to be contacted by your visitors who want to buy your ad space.

This strategy can bring you quick money, but it can be tedious if advertisers don’t renew their contract and you have to always find new ones.

Create and sell your own product

Selling your products online through your site is a good way to make money. The best thing about this strategy is that you can keep the whole profit; there is no affiliate network or middle man who will take a cut. You don’t need to join any programs and wait for approval, and don’t have to wait for payments; you will get paid as soon as someone buys your product.

This strategy may look very simple, but in fact requires a lot of pre-work. First you will have to create a good product that has potential. Many online marketers create eBooks, and sell them for couple of bucks, other create various digital products such as desktop applications, website templates, design mockups, etc. Create a product that you have some sort of experience or knowledge about, be enthusiastic while advertising it, offer free copies to website owners and ask for a review. By offering free samples of your products can quickly increase your sales.

Collect donations through your website

Setting up a PayPal donation button on your site is very easy. Collecting donations from readers is hard, though. People are willing to donate, but they need to know how the money will be spent. Tell your story, explain why you need those donations, and offer something in exchange to your donors.

For instance, you can create a website which offers free downloadable products: you can ask website users to help you continue to run the website, create new products, upgrade hosting plan to offer better performance, etc.

If you are a musician, or an artist you can sign up to Patreon.com and collect donations through this site. Keep in mind that they will take a commission on you, but in exchange they offer a very good and secure platform to set goals and collect payments.

Lead generation

Generating leads to a company is another very popular way to make some quick money online. In short, you send visitors through a tracking link to a company, and you will get paid for every user who signs up to that campaign. Users will not purchase any product or service just yet; they will only submit their contact info such as name, phone number and email address trough a form.

The insurance niche is a very profitable lead generation market. For example if you are running a website or a blog about cars, you can easily advertise a car insurance company and send them leads.

Accept sponsored articles from relevant companies

If your website receives a good amount of traffic, you can seek for advertisers who are willing to pay you for writing a promotional article and advertise their products or services on your site.

Beside direct payment, you can accept free products which you will review. For instance, you are running a tech related blog; you can ask a company to send you a free smart phone to review. This is a win-win situation: you got a smart phone for free and they got a review and will constantly receive traffic for your website.

Once your site has an established group of readers, you have to be gentle and do not annoy them with constant product reviews and promotions. Also try to keep the sponsored content relevant to your website niche.

Create a web shop and sell online

If you are already have a store and want to increase your sales, an online store could be helpful in this process. Creating and managing an ecommerce website is not an easy task, but if you have the resources to do it right, you can open new doors in front of your business. There are thousands of online stores, but only few of them make big money, so it is crucial to have a long term plan in brand building, marketing and choice of products. A web-shop involves a lot more budget and knowledge than a simple website, so plan accordingly.

Build an Email List and send out offers

Having a subscription form on your website, offering something unique to your readers can be a good way to start building your email list. Once you have a good number of people in your database, you can send out different offers.

Please keep in mind that overdoing it can lead to negative effects: for instance, you are sending out multiple emails daily with same offers can force your users to unsubscribe or mark you as spam. Certainly you don’t want this to happen, so find the golden way to do it properly.

Sell your website to someone

Finally, if your website is making a good amount of cash on a monthly basis, but you don’t have to time or the resource to manage or to scale it, you should consider selling it. Usually websites can be sold for 10-20 times more than the monthly income. So if you are making $200 from AdSense, you could sell your site for $4000.

Selling a website is not as hard, you just have to find the right people to sell to. You can do public auctions on websites such as Flippa.com or open a thread on a popular webmaster forum such as v7.com. You can also hire a broker, who will find you clients in exchange of a certain percentage. My favorite website brokerage company is Latonas.com, check them out with confidence.

Other options to make money from your site

Certainly the list could continue, however I consider that these are the most profitable and easiest ways to make a steady income online with the help of your site. You can offer service, consultation, advertise your offline business and get clients through your site, such in the case of a photography website, open a membership program or just do what others are doing, usually this works very well.

Hope you found the right strategy to start with, now go and make some money. If you are looking to build a website quickly at an affordable rate, I highly recommend iPage web hosting provider. They offer high quality hosting as well different tools to make a professional website yourself.

The post 10 ways to make money from your website appeared first on The Grue.

Call to action (CTA) is used in marketing to convert more website visitors into leads or customers. This is a very simple design element, used on websites, that stands out from the main content and stimulates the reader to take action. Usually call to action will guide the user to a registration form, to a subscriber form or to the purchase page.

In this quick tutorial I will show you few tricks on how to create a call to action in Joomla, and integrate it into your content.

Create call-to-action image

Creating a cool image that will attract your visitors attention can be a good way to increase conversion. You can create an image with Photoshop or other image editing software.

First off, choose a cool background for your image, add your title that will grab more attention, and create a cool button. Here is a quick example I designed:

Once your image is ready, go to your Joomla website’s Module Manager, create a new Custom HTML module and upload the image. Insert the image into module’s text editor, place the link on the image, hide the title of the module and publish the module to a non-existing module position (this is necessary because, you only want this module to be displayed in the content).

Now go to the article you want to place the module in, and add the following code anywhere in the text:

{loadposition calltoaction}

This command, will load the “calltoaction” module position. If you have multiple modules published to this position, all of them will be loaded, so prepare your modules accordingly.

Save the article, and check out the front-end of your Joomla website. You should now see the image inside your article.

Now you probably ask me, why not to directly insert your image into the article and create a module instead? Well, if you are planning to use the call-to-action image on multiple pages, it is easier to control it via module, then changing each and every article instead.

Use a call-to-action module

Instead using an image, you can also use a call-to-action module. For instance, here is a great call-to-action module, that can be fully customized. You can change any color and also button styles to make it stand out more from your website content.This module is compatible with Joomla 2.5 and 3.x versions.

So download this module, and install it to your website as you do with any other Joomla extension. Once installed, go to the Module Manager and set up the module:

1. add the call-to-action title (and description if you want) and choose a color for it

2. choose the background color of the module (choose a color that stands out from the content and which makes the title more prominent)

3. set up the button, choose style, color and a FontAweasome icon.

Publish the module to a custom module position and load the module anywhere in your Joomla article with the {loadposition module_position} function. Just like in the above mentioned example.

Now, refresh your article’s page and make sure that module was set up correctly.

These are the two methods I use to insert a call-to-action form in my projects. Some times I use just a simple image, in other cases I use call-to-action module, depends on the situation. Please let me know which is your favorite method to create a call to action from in Joomla? Submit your feedback in the comments section bellow.

The post How to create a Call-To-Action in Joomla appeared first on The Grue.

While we are working on a Joomla map module that will require Google Map API key, I will create a tutorial on how to enable and generate an API key for your website. You will be able to use this key only on one domain, but if you want to enable the module on multiple website, you can always generate a new API key.

In this tutorial you will learn:

• How to create a new project in Google Developers Console
• How to enable the Google Map API
• How to get a new API key

Creating a new project

In order to grab an API key, you need to create a project. Go to https://console.developers.google.com/project add a name to your project and hit the “Create Project” button.

Enable the Google Map API

Once your project is created, click on the project name and access your newly create project. Go to APIs & auth menu in the left hand side of the page, and in the APIs menu look for the Google Maps JavaScript API link.

By clicking on this link, it will redirect you to a new page, where you can Enable the API. Just simply click on the button to activate it.

Create a new API key

After activating the API, go to the Credentials menu and click on Add Credentials > API key:

A pop-up window will ask what kind of API you want to create. Click on the Browser key button.

Once clicked, you will need to insert your domain name on which you want to use the API. This is an important step, because you don’t want everyone to use your API. Insert your domain(s) and hit the “Create” button.

Now you will be redirected to Credentials page again, where you can grab your new API key.

Grab the API key and save it for later use. You can always go back to your project later and get the API key or create a new one, or even delete your existing keys.

The post How to get Google Map JavaScript API key? appeared first on The Grue.

Just did a quick search on Google and realize that the logo has changed. The new logo is a bit bolder, and it has no shadow. The font has also been changed and looks a bit more minimalist. The above screenshot represent the logos of Google before and after. (logos and names are copyrighted to Google, the screenshot was taken for information purpose only)

Here is video that shows the evolution of Google over the years:

The post New Google Logo! appeared first on The Grue.

If you are building a Joomla website, and need a slick map plugin to display your company’s location, I’m glad to introduce you our new module, TheGrue Maps. This module was developed based on Google Maps API and CodyHouse’s custom Google map plugin. The module use jQuery to render the map, and requires an individual API key which you can get from here. I also created a step-by-step tutorial on how to get a new Google Maps JavaScript API key, check out this tutorial for instructions.

How to setup TheGrue Maps module

The module is easy to setup. After installing it to your Joomla 3.x or 2.5 website do the following steps:

1. In the module manager, enable the maps module and select the pages where you want to display

2. Add your own API key (in order to get an API key, you will need to create a Google account, but do not need to purchase any Google products)

3. Set the latitude and the longitude of your location (this site will help you to find the coordinates based on your address)

4. Change custom settings of the map and publish the module.

Here is a screenshot of the available parameters. The fields marked with * are required files, the module will not work with incorrect API key or missing coordinates.

As usual, if you have noticed any problem with this module or have found a blog, please submit your query in the comments below. We will try to help you out!

The post Google Maps Module for Joomla 3.4 and 2.5 appeared first on The Grue.

eHost has been around for a while. The company has been established back in 1999, and has been offering web hosting and online services ever since. This year, in 2015 has been re-branded: got a new website design, new logo, new control panel. eHost has been running on vDeck but the new service offers cPanel to its customers.

I’m not sure, but probably they will migrate all their customers from the old control panel, because I have found traces of the old website as well. So probably the existing customers are still running on the old platform.

Because the buzz around this web host is so heave, I’ve got a test account for myself to see how this hosting company works. I needed a new hosting anyways, because I’m working on some new projects and needed more web-space. Have been monitoring this host for about one month. Here is a screenshot from my UptimeRobot account:

As you can see the up-time is around 99.98% for the last 30 days, that means that my website was down for about 9 minutes in the last month. In my opinion, this is a very good uptime.

I will keep testing this hosting, and will come with a more detailed review as I have a full vision on what is going on here. Until then, check out eHost.com and see what features they offer.

The post eHost.com Review – Is it the best new Web Host? appeared first on The Grue.

I don’t know how much use will be for this code, but I thought I will share it with you. Today I needed to display the number of published articles on a Joomla website, and I used the following code:

<?php
$db = JFactory::getDbo();

$query = $db->getQuery(true);

$query->select('COUNT(*)');

$query->from($db->quoteName('#__content'));

$query->where($db->quoteName('state')." = 1");

$db->setQuery($query);

$count = $db->loadResult();

echo 'Numer of articles:' . $count;
?>

What this code actually does is: it is connection to the database, starting a query and counts all the rows with state = 1 (published) from the _content table. Once the query is finished, outputs the value of the total number of published articles.

Place this code anywhere in your template and customize it if you want. I did the following customization:

<?php
echo '<div class="well">Number of published articles:<strong>' . $count . '</strong></div>';
?>

Instead of plain text, this is the result I got:

If you have a more elegant way to display the number of published articles on the Joomla front-end please let me know in the comments.

The post How to display number of published articles in Joomla 3.x appeared first on The Grue.

Your website is running on Joomla 2.5 or 3.x version. Maybe it seems a bit slow. Probably it is only you who is experiencing this issue, but your users may also notice the performance issue. Slow websites are not only scaring away users, but it can hurt in search engine ranking. Google, with the new algorithm updates will consider website speed as a ranking factor.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to speed up your Joomla website in just couple of minutes.

First of all, you should test your website first. To test the speed of your website, I suggest using the following tools:

• Google Page Insights
• Pingdom Tools
• GTmetrix

For this tutorial I will use the Google Page insights tool to test my Joomla website, and see how is improving. Here is the test result for the non-optimized website:

As you can see, it is pretty bad.

Update Joomla to latest version

Important: before you perform any update to your website, please make a backup of the files and database.

To be sure, that your website will run on full speed, you should always use the latest Joomla versions, because each version may contain small tweaks and fixes that can improve website speed.

Enable Joomla Caching

By enabling the cache in your Joomla system, it will convert the dynamic pages into static pages and store them on the server for a set time. This will significantly speed up your Joomla website.

Here is how to enable caching in Joomla:

Turn on conservative caching, set file as cache handler and set cache time to 60 minutes, just like in this screenshot:

The cache plugin have to be also enabled in the:

Enable Gzip page compression

To enable the Gzip page compression you will have to access the:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>

#The following line is enough for .js and .css

AddOutputFilter DEFLATE js css
#The following line also enables compression by file content type, for the following list of Content-Type:s

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml application/xml
#The following lines are to avoid bugs with some browsers

BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip

BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

</IfModule>

Install and Enable JCH Optimize Plugin

This plugin does not come with the Joomla, core so you will need to install it. Download the plugin form the JED. After installing the plugin, go to

Search for the JCH optimize and activate it. You should also take a look inside and set the following configurations:

The best would be to place the javascript files at the bottom of the page, however if you have modules that are using jQuery (slideshows, image galleries) may stop working.

Leverage browser caching

Optimize caching via .htaccess. By setting expiration time for different files and HTTP headers, can significantly increase speed. Place the following code into the .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_expires.c>

FileETag MTime Size

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain text/html text/xml text/css application/xml application/xhtml+xml application/rss+xml application/javascript application/x-javascript

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 seconds"

ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 600 seconds"

ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 604800 seconds"

ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 216000 seconds"

ExpiresByType application/xhtml+xml "access plus 600 seconds"

ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 216000 seconds"

ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 216000 seconds"

ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 2592000 seconds"

ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 2592000 seconds"

ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 2592000 seconds"

ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 2592000 seconds"

</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_headers.c>

<FilesMatch "\.(js|css|xml|gz)$">

Header append Vary: Accept-Encoding

</FilesMatch>

</IfModule>

Remove all unused extensions

The more extensions you install to your Joomla site, the slower it will load. So make sure that you remove all extensions from the database that are not actually used.

Social plugins, that shows the number of shares, likes or tweets will slow down your website. These plugins use external libraries and APIs to display those numbers. Each time a user refresh the page, the plugin will access the API and will slow down your website.

Other tricks to increase speed

So here is a screenshot with the results of Google Page Insights. I was able to bring the page up from 55 to 90 with just few changes.

There are other things that I could still improve, such as minifying CSS and JS files, image optimization, render blocking (placing CSS files at the end of the page), and other. Loading Google fonts or JavaScript from external resources can also decrease the speed, so take in consideration this aspect as well.

The template you are currently using can also be a factor for slowing down your site. If the template use too many images can be a problem.

Please note, that there could be some disadvantages on caching your website. For instance you will have to clear the cache every time you make modifications to your website. Depending on the cache level, when publishing a new article, it will not show up instantly, until you clear the cache. So make sure that you keep a good balance between the level of caching and the functionality that you need.

Is your Joomla website still slow?

If you did everything from the above mentioned methods and your website is still slow, probably you should consider switching to better hosting. For instance, InMotion hosting is a very good hosting provider, who offers business hosting service along with Joomla optimized web hosting. Their servers are super-fast, are running on SSD drives and on advanced hosting plans the Max-Speed zone will be enabled. This will give an extra boost to your Joomla website.

The post How to speed up your Joomla website? appeared first on The Grue.

If you are running a small business and don’t have a website yet, you should get one now! In 2015 every small business should have a website. Why? Because the majority of your potential customers are looking for services and products online, and businesses that don’t have a website are losing clients.

These days it is not even necessary to hire a web designer or developer to create a website for your business. With so many tools, website builders, templates it is easy to build a professional website yourself. Although building a website is easy, finding the right web hosting plan is hard.

There are thousands of smaller and bigger companies offering web hosting service. Which should you choose? The decision is even harder, when you see the huge differences in pricing and features. If you are not into websites, you may not even know what features you need at all.

In this article I will help you figure out which are the most needed hosting features for a small business website, as well will suggest few very reliable companies you can choose from. I won’t recommend you anything that is crap or I have not tried out myself.

These are the top 3 hosting providers I recommend for small business sites:

– read the rest of the article to find out why!

What type of website you want to build?

Before you are going to buy a small business host, you need to know the type of website you want to host with them. For instance, if you are looking to sell products or service online, you will need an e-commerce website. To describe and present your company, you will need a simple, company presentation website. If you are thinking on publishing articles on a regular basis to attract more attention and drive your potential customers in your firm’s “behind the scene” section, a blog will be needed for this purpose. For a photographer, artist, or a musician an online portfolio will be the best option.

So to recapitulate, here are the most common website types that small businesses use:

• E-commerce
• Company Presentation
• Blog Website
• Online Portfolio

Once you figure out what type of site you want to create, the next step is to choose a software. There are many website building tools available on the internet, but you should only choose the best. For a simple website you can use an online website builder such as Weebly. For a blog or portfolio you should choose WordPress. For presenting your company’s services or products you should go with Joomla, while for an eCommerce website you go with Magento or WooCommerce (which is an extension for WordPress).

Weebly: is a browser based website building tool, which allows you to create a basic website. There are no requirements of knowing any programming language or web design. Its drag-and-drop function makes it easy and convenient to everyone to use the tool. The Essential Plan offered by iPage web hosting, offers free access to the Weebly site builder.

WordPress: is the most popular content management system. At the beginning WordPress was mostly used for blogs, but has rapidly evolved into a leading open source software that powers millions of website worldwide. It is free to use, easy to customize, however it requires some minimal level of technical knowledge to get started. Still, there is no need for programming skills to build a website with WordPress. For hosting your WordPress site, I highly recommend BlueHost company.

Joomla: is the second most popular CMS, after WordPress. This is also an open source program that is used by universities, news portals, from small businesses to large corporations and everything in between. It is highly customizable and extremely flexible, having a huge template and extension base and a huge community. To get started with Joomla is easy, however it requires an entry level of programming knowledge to customize a Joomla based website. InMotion provides reliable, Joomla hosting service.

WooCommerce: it is the most popular e-commerce extension for WordPress. Yes, you can build an online shop with WordPress, by using this plugin. It is also open source and free to use and comes with all the necessary features and extensions that an online shop will ever need. Building and managing an e-commerce website with WooCommerce requires an advanced level of IT knowledge. Both BlueHost and InMotion are a good choice for hosting a WooCommerce shop.

Magento: is not the most popular, but probably the best open source e-commerce platform. Its setup and management requires a more advanced level of knowledge in programming. InMotion provides one-click Magento installation and a stable hosting service for e-commerce websites.

Now, that you know what software to use for your site, you can start looking for a hosting provider that supports that particular software.

What type of web hosting plan you need?

If it was not hard enough with thousands of hosting providers, now you have to figure out what type of hosting you need. There are four type of hosting plans you can choose from:

• Shared hosting
• VPS (virtual private server)
• Dedicated Hosting
• Cloud Hosting

So which, hosting type should you select?

Shared Hosting: is used by majority of individuals and small businesses. This is the most basic and cheapest hosting plan, costing around $5 per month (paid upfront for 12 or 24 months). It is used by low traffic websites only. Shared hosting support WordPress and Joomla as well, but as mentioned, it is good for small, low traffic websites. This type of hosting is fully managed, that means that you will get full support and a control panel to manage your website, domains, files, emails, etc.

VPS: is mostly used by small e-commerce websites, with a product number below 1000 and moderate traffic. A virtual server will cost somewhere $25-$100 per month. It depends on the server configuration and resource requirements. It is wise to choose a fully managed virtual server plan, because you will get support as well pre-installed software of your choice to (such as cPanel) the server. VPS provides much higher security, performance and flexibility to its users.

Dedicated servers: are used by enterprise and corporate level websites, as well by governmental websites. It is used to store sensitive information such as credit card numbers, name addresses, medical files etc. It has the highest level of security at a very high cost; ranging between $150 and $300 per month. Running a dedicated server requires a high IT knowledge, a system administrator and a lot of budget. A dedicated host can handle very large number of website traffic.

Cloud hosting: is used by both small and large websites. This type of hosting is used by websites that has a world-wide audience, spreading their website over multiple data-center locations. Having website files stored on multiple servers in multiple locations on the planet, makes it very reliable and super-fast. The user will connect to the nearest server and will access files from the nearest data-center. Due to the clustered servers, it is extremely scalable, supporting a huge amount of traffic at once. Although it is very powerful, sensitive information cannot be stored here, because user has no control over where the dataset is being copied over the network.

Which is the right small business hosting for you?

Now, you know what type of host it is needed to fit your budget and website needs. It is time to talk about web hosting.

Above I gave you some hints, on which company is good for different website types, but here I will go into details. Currently I have at least one account with all the companies I will mention bellow. With each company I have more than 3 year experience, so I had enough time to test them and make an opinion.

iPage Web Hosting

Ipage (5 year experience): from my experience I know that iPage performs very well if you build your site with their Weebly site builder. It is also good for hosting small WordPress sites that has traffic less than 200 unique visitors a day. The support is good.

BlueHost Web Hosting

BlueHost (5+ year experience): I have mostly used this company for hosting WordPress sites and had no major issues. It is a great and affordable option to host small to medium sized WordPress sites.

InMotion Hosting

InMotion (3+ year experience): I have been hosting mostly Joomla websites with InMotion hosting. They are more pricey than the above mentioned companies, but with better performance. Currently managing a friend’s WooCommerce online shop on a virtual server hosted by InMotion hosting and the performance is amazing. The support is great, they have experience with all kind of open source software including WordPress and Joomla and they are always there to help you out.

So, these are my recommendations for small business hosting. Hope, that my tutorial has helped you to figure out what type of website you want to build, what hosting type you should choose for it, and which company to buy hosting from. If you still have questions, I’m here to help. Just submit your query in the comments bellow and I will try to answer as soon as I get online. Thanks for reading and have a great day!

The post How to Find the Best Small Business Web Hosting? appeared first on The Grue.

So you are planning to create a hobby website for yourself, or maybe a website for your business. But you don’t know which hosting company to choose or what hosting plan to purchase. In this article I will explain the differences between hosting plans and will also suggest some web hosting providers you can rely on for a long term base.

What is shared hosting and who use it?

This type of hosting plan is the most popular. The shared hosting plan is designed to provide all the necessary features to get started with a small website. The majority of websites are hosted on shared hosting plans. The name of this plan comes from the way accounts are created on the web server. In case of shared hosting, multiple accounts are distributed over the server, sharing the server’s resources (CPU, RAM, bandwidth, storage). This reduces the cost of the hosting significantly. Usually a shared plan will cost $2-10 monthly, and this is paid upfront for a year or two years period. There are some hosting companies such as eHost, which accepts monthly payments.

This hosting type is used by bloggers, hobby websites, and small and medium traffic business websites. Most shared plans will accept eCommerce, however you should note that installing an SSL certificate on a shared plan is impossible because this requires a dedicated IP address. For this purpose you will need at least a VPS hosting.

What about the “unlimited hosting plan”? Why would you pay for a VPS or dedicated server if your shared plan is unlimited? The “unlimited” plan is only used for marketing. In reality each shared account has its limitations. It is possible that the company will not put a cap on the amount of bandwidth and space your account is using, however it will limit the server load, file size, number of files etc.

The downside of shared plans is that the activity of each account will affect the others from the server. So in case one hosting account use a big portion of the server resources, will slow down the entire server. The lack of security is also an issue that you may want to take in consideration.

What is VPS hosting?

Virtual private server is enrolled between shared hosting and dedicated server considering both price and features. In case of VPS hosting, the web server is partitioned in multiple accounts. Each account having its own dedicated resources, operation system, bandwidth, dedicated IP, etc. Unlike shared hosting, a VPS account will not affect the other accounts hosted on the same server.

I would call a VPS plan the perfect balance between cost and features. It is designed for websites that require dedicated server resources, high security and dedicated IP address, but still being affordable.

VPS hosting can be managed or unmanaged. In my opinion, it is worth paying more for the managed service, unless you can manage a server. The managed plan usually comes with an operation system of your choice, a control panel (cPanel), dedicated RAM, CPU, bandwidth, storage and dedicated IP. You will have full control over the server, as well root access to modify it as you please, with the possibility to have assistance from the hosting provider you are renting the server from.

Virtual hosting is usually used for eCommerce websites, which needs SSL and a stable and powerful hosting; as well by business websites or blogs with high traffic. I highly recommend InMotion hosting, if you are looking for an affordable and reliable VPS plan.

The downside of VPS is that requires some level of IT knowledge, and it might be difficulty for a beginner to get started with a virtual server.

How Dedicated Hosting Works?

When you are opting for a dedicated hosting plan, you actually rent an entire server with full control over its hardware and software. The server you are renting will be stored in the hosting company’s data-center and this will provide with the necessary power and bandwidth your server needs. They will be also responsible for replacing broken hardware. Managing a dedicated server can be difficulty; you need a very strong IT knowledge to be able to run a dedicated plan. There are certainly managed and unmanaged dedicated plans.

If you choose an unmanaged service, you are on your own. You will need to configure the server. However, if you can’t do that, you can hire a system administrator from the company you are renting the server from, who can help you out with all the server management.

Dedicated servers can be used for many things. You can partitionate the server in multiple smaller accounts and create a VPS or even a shared hosting server. Usually corporations use dedicated servers to store sensitive data such as credit card information, user personal information, or to host their online applications and websites, enjoying the highest security and best performance.

The downside of a dedicated server is the high monthly cost and the need of strong knowledge in server management.

Is Cloud hosting only for the big players?

When we are talking about cloud hosting we actually refer to the way on how servers are configured. In case of cloud hosting, multiple servers are clustered in way to provide an affordable, scalable and reliable web infrastructure.

When you upload your website to a cloud server, the files will be distributed over the whole network, creating multiple copies of your website. Usually cloud hosting companies have data-centers all over the world, meaning your websites will be copied over multiple data-centers.

Having your files stored in multiple locations, you can be sure that there will be no data loss due to hardware failure. Users will enjoy a faster navigation on your website, because they will access the files from the nearest datacenter.

In the past only big corporations used cloud hosting to provide the best experience for their world-wide audience, but today anyone can upload their website to the cloud. For instance, DigitalOcean have multiple cloud hosting plans, starting from only $5 per month.

The downside of hosting your website in the cloud is that you don’t have control over where the data is stored. Therefore, cloud hosting is not suitable for storing sensitive information, unlike dedicated hosting.

Which is the right plan for me?

Now, that you know what are the different hosting options, you can easily choose the plan that suits your budget and needs. So, shared hosting is great for small business sites and personal projects, VPS is great for hosting eCommerce sites and medium traffic blogs and sites which may require a dedicated IP address. Dedicated hosting is designed to provide the highest security and good performance for websites and sensitive data, while cloud hosting is suitable for delivering web content world-wide at the highest speed.

If you are still having issues deciding what plan to choose for your project, please submit your comment bellow and I will try to help you out.

The post Web Hosting Plans Comparison: Shared, VPS, Dedicated & Cloud appeared first on The Grue.

Most likely you have found this page, because you are interested in building an online shop. So if you are planning to sell products or services online via a shopping cart, and you are especially interested in doing it with iPage, read this article to find out the pros and cons.

Ipage is one of my favorite hosting companies and have been recommending them to my friends who were looking to build a small website. In my iPage review I have enumerated numerous possibilities to build your website with this hosting company, but I did not relay went into talking much about building an online store. In this article I will reveal if iPage is a good choice to host your eCommerce website.

WooCommerce shop and Ipage hosting

WooCommerce is a free shopping cart plugin for WordPress. Ipage allows you to install and host WordPress on your account and also allows you to install any plugin you want. The WooCommerce plugin will not be installed automatically with your WordPress installation, you will have to upload it manually via FTP and enable it in the Plugins manager.

Ipage servers are working great with small websites; they do ok with WordPress as well, having an average response time of 600ms. WooCommerce however is a resource heave plugin. So if you install this plugin to your WordPress site hosted with iPage, it will slow down your site significantly. Adding more than 20 products to it will increase loading time and your shop will provide a very poor user experience. With a slow and unreliable website, you won’t be able to sell anything.

Although you can set up a WooCommerce shop with iPage, I would not recommend wasting your time with it. Instead I recommend hosting your WooCommerce shop with BlueHost.

Hosting VirtueMart with iPage

VirtueMart is one of the most popular shopping cart extensions for Joomla. Ipage offers you the option to one-click install Joomla to your domain. VirtueMart is not included in the core installation; you will need to install this extension via the Joomla admin panel.

Joomla requires more resources than WordPress, so a Joomla website will always be slower. Considering this fact, the response time will be over 600ms. From my testing resulted an average 900ms response time for my Joomla website hosted with iPage. Now if you install VirtueMart, this number will increase and your shop will be even slower.

If you are looking to build your online shop using Joomla and VirtueMart, iPage is not the right choice. I recommend InMotion hosting for this purpose.

Install a shopping cart to your iPage account

The SimpleScript application includes multiple shopping cart scripts you can install to your website. This script enables you to install PrestShop, osCommerce, CubeCart, ZenCart, AgoraCart, OpenCart or other shopping cart software automatically.

The good thing about building your online store using shopping cart software is that your website will have the exact features you need. Depending on the shopping cart script, it might use less resources compared to Joomla. However if you want additional features to your website such as custom pages or a blog, a shopping cart might not be the best option for you.

You should also consider the fact, that the Essential Plan, offered by iPage is a shared hosting with a shared IP address. If you want to install a dedicated SSL certificate to your site, you will need a dedicated IP. This is simply not possible with iPage shared plan. For this you will need at least a VPS hosting plan, or you can choose a cheaper option: BlueHost’s BusinessPro package, which includes a dedicated IP, SSL and domain privacy. Perfect for hosting shopping carts.

iPage hosting and Ecwid shopping cart

The last option you have with iPage to build your online store is to use their premium shopping cart software, Ecwid. For an additional $4.95 per month cost, you can create an online store with up to 20 products. This plan can be upgraded to add unlimited products to the store.

The Basic Ecwid plan can be integrated with your existing WordPress, Weebly or Joomla website. The Professional plan integrates with Facebook, while the Unlimited plan integrates with eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, Google and other sales channel feeds.

Summary: Is iPage good for eCommerce?

If you already have an iPage account and want to create an online shop to extend the functionality of your website, the best option is to go with Ecwid shopping cart. This however will involve additional monthly cost.

For small websites iPage is perfect option. But if you are planning to sell online, I do not recommend using their Essential Plan. Instead you should check out BlueHost Business Plan or InMotion Hosting for reliable eCommerce hosting solution.

If you have any questions or suggestions, let’s talk bellow in the comment section.

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