WordPress is updated on a regular basis. Some people are however afraid to install the latest version of the platform because they think that it might affect the security and the operability of their websites. But it is important to note that every update usually seeks to address a number of flaws or vulnerabilities that might have been present in the previous versions.

Therefore, you are at more risk when you don’t upgrade compared to when you install the latest version. If you are still not convinced, here are some of the reasons why you need to keep your WordPress website updated:

Bug Fixes

However rigorous testing a platform might undergo before the final deployment, there are always certain bugs that might slip through the cracks. These bugs can present fresh security threat or compromise on the functionality of the software. In WordPress, such bugs are fixed in the minor releases. By not upgrading, you will be running a WordPress with known vulnerabilities which malicious people can exploit to wreak havoc on your website.

Fix security issues

One of the primary reasons why you need to keep your WordPress websites updated is to enhance their security. Being open source and the most popular blogging software in the world, WordPress tends to attract a lot of hackers who try to look and exploit vulnerabilities in order to attack people websites. On the other hand, there are a good number of developers who are keen to find any loopholes in the code and work out fixes for them. Whenever an update is released therefore, it fixes the security vulnerabilities that might have been noticed in the previous version.

Enhanced speed

Performance is also a key metric with every update of the WordPress platform. The developers are always trying to make it work well by making it run faster and perform more efficiently. Installing the recent version will ensure that you get good speeds and great performance from your website. You also need to remember that the speed of the website is very important when it comes to search engine optimization and this should be your sole reason of updating your WordPress website even if you never wanted to.

Compatibility with plugins and themes

Most plugins and theme developers usually coordinate their products with the recent releases of WordPress so that they can benefit from the new features and the enhancements. If you fail to update, you may find that you are unable to install certain plugins or your website will not be compatible with certain themes. This is why you need to keep your WordPress website updated at all times.

Benefit from new features

Major updates of the WordPress platform will always come with new features meant to enhance your experience and interaction with the platform. For instance, WordPress 4.0 improved the plugin installation experience and also came with inline image editing capabilities. Using a past version will greatly limit your experience and you will find it difficult to find help should you run into problems since the majority are essentially using the most recent versions.

Humans are visual beings who tend to have different responses to colors. Several researches conducted over the years show that colors have the ability to influence a person’s state of mind and therefore it is very important to consider in detail the color scheme of your website.

Your choice of website colors can determine if the visitor will stay long in the site, bounce back immediately, make a purchase or subscribe to your newsletter. You therefore have every reason to be vigilant and considerate on the colors you use on your site and presented here are a few tips to help you find your way around with the site colors:

Natural Color Palettes Work Best

When compared to their artificial counterparts, natural color palettes are more pleasing to most people. They are easy to use and can be combined to create various emotional responses you wish to invoke in the visitors. Artificial color palettes such as bright green or bright red have a tendency of causing the eyes to get fatigued thus making the visitors to navigate away very fast.

It is also important to note that different color combination will work for different products or industries. For instance, if you are promoting culinary products, then primary colors such red, yellow or green can do very well.

Contrast The Page’s Background And The Text

The main aim of creating contrast is to enhance readability of the site and put emphasis on the images present on the page. To enhance the readability of the text on the website, the text should contrast the background. For instance, black text on a white background will be very appropriate. Other than white, backgrounds such as grey, black or dark blue will also work well with white text.

Suppose you want to attract attention to particular product images on the page, you can contrast between saturated and desaturated colors either in the background or foreground but not the same type for the background as well as the foreground.

Always Create Chromatic Harmony with Utmost 3 Colors

For a pleasant visual experience of the site visitors, it is recommended that you create a chromatic harmony by using three colors consistently throughout the website. Though three is the recommended number you can play around with, you can try four or five provided that you maintain the harmony and consistency throughout the website? More colors will end up causing inconsistency and ultimately distracting the visitor from carrying out the intended objective.

Consider Persons with Visual Disability

When choosing the color scheme of your website, you should have in mind that there are certain people with visual impairment who will also be browsing your website. You need to consider them as well.

Finally, you have to remember that you ultimate choice of colors will be determined by the emotions you wish to invoke from the site visitors. Different color combinations have different meanings and will create different reactions from your visitors. Again, the reactions will vary depending on the age, gender and cultural background amongst others. Therefore, proper market research is important to find the right combination which will create the intended emotional reaction to the prospective visitors to your site.

It is the dream of every website owner to have quality and targeted traffic to their websites. However, unless you have set a good budget for paid traffic, the process of getting free quality traffic is usually a painful and takes a lot of time with no guarantee of success. But for those using WordPress, it is relatively easy to gain better search engine rankings as compared to the other platforms. It is a SEO friendly CMS and it will help you a great deal in your SEO endeavors. Below are some of the unique features that make it to friendly to the search engines:

Structured for the Search Engines

The structure of WordPress is in such a manner that it enables proper and efficient content organization. It takes into account content features such as headers, alt tags, Meta tags, descriptions etc to arrange and display content in the manner desired by the search engines. With such a structure, it won’t only be easy for the search bots to index the pages but also the users will have a great experience going through the website. The end result is better rankings leading to increased traffic flow to the website.

Customized URLs

One factor considered by the search engines in awarding rankings is the URL structure of the website. A good URL should be relevant to the content upon which it is pointing towards. The URL should also make sense not only to the search engine bots but also to the user who will be clicking on it. WordPress allows you to have relevant and customized URL for your pages and posts. For example, if you have a post talking about contemporary arts, you can have a URL that reads http://mysite.com/contemporaryarts instead of one which reads http://mysite.com/sod38200sdfas. You will get better rankings with the former compared to the latter.

Ability to Optimize Images

Image optimization is one feature ignored by the majority of the content management systems. WordPress however offers great flexibility with regards to image optimization. You are free to optimize your images using headers, Meta tags, alt tags, descriptions etc. The benefit of doing so is that you are making it easy for users, including those using screen readers to make sense of the images you have in your WordPress website for creative artists. Because image optimization enhances the user experience, you will eventually get better search engine rankings on your website.

WordPress Has Inbuilt RSS Feeds

The RSS Feeds help in syndicating your content to several feed directories in entire internet. It is a subtle way of telling the internet as well as the search engine bots that you have new content which they should come and check out. WordPress comes with inbuilt RSS feed which submits feeds to several other directories whenever you have fresh and new content in your website. In the absence of this, you will have to do this manually – a painful process that takes a lot of time. With this feature, bots will visit your site each time you post new content and rank the content accordingly.

The mobile friendly feature is one of the recent technologies that webmasters as well as business owners are using to reap maximum benefits from their websites. Since a mobile friendly website will render in both desktop and mobile devices, the number of people who will have access to your site will increase tremendously due to the huge number of users accessing the internet with mobile devices. But there are also other nice benefits you will be getting if your WordPress website for creative arts is mobile friendly. They include the following:

Superior User Experience

The user experience is greatly enhanced with mobile friendly websites. Such websites are usually lightweight in nature hence they don’t take a long time to load. This feature is ideal for the modern day internet users who are never patient and will get distracted quite easily if the site takes forever to load. Again, a fast loading site will reduce the bounce rate of visitors in the website since most of them will access the content faster and not leave immediately they get into the site due to slow loading speed.

A mobile friendly website also doesn’t distort the flow of content or break the links present in the site. It therefore implies that for a creative artist website, all the images, music and videos will render without any problems, further enhancing the user experience.

Higher Search Engine Rankings

Good search engine rankings is one of the secrets to having access to a continuous flow of free and targeted traffic to your WordPress website for creative arts. The search engines are keen on the user experience and they will reward you with better rankings if users have a great time when going through your website. Since WordPress offer superior user experience in the sense that it doesn’t distort contents and loads faster hence reducing the bounce back rates, WordPress sites usually rank higher than most of the sites developed using the other platforms.

Connectivity and Portability

When your website is mobile friendly, it implies that one only needs to have a mobile device and internet connection to access it. The importance of this can’t be ignored in the creative arts industry. In most cases, users and fans will want to access the website when they need some form of entertainment. It therefore makes a lot of sense to provide them with a website they can access at any place and any time with their mobile devices. WordPress gives you the privilege to achieve this in a hassle free manner.

Get Ahead of the Pack

Mobile friendliness is a recent technology and yet to be adopted by the majority. By letting your WordPress website for artist mobile friendly at this time, you will be among the early adopters and you will benefit greatly before the others come on board. By the time the rest will be joining you, you shall have established a formidable online presence and it will take a while for your competitors to catch up with you. By this time, you will be having a strong brand to help you in marketing yourself and becoming a successful artist.

In the present times, you will never run out of options when searching for a platform to design your website for creative arts. But despite the presence of the many platforms available, WordPress has come out strongly as the industry leader. It powers over 70 million websites and this number seems to be increasing with each and every day. Here is why it is such a powerful content management system and why it should be your first choice of platform for developing your website:

WordPress Is Free and Open Source

It doesn’t cost you anything other than internet connection to download, develop and deploy websites using WordPress. In addition to being free, WordPress is also open source. This simply means that it source code is available to the public and they can inspect and modify it to suite their various needs. With this comes the capability to have highly customized sites to meet the specific needs of the site’s users.

WordPress Can Be Extended with Themes and Plugins

WordPress can be easily extended using themes and plugins. This is why it is very simple to develop professional looking websites by using the right theme, even with zero knowledge of code or programming. You can also customize the features as well as the functionalities of the site with the relevant plugins and offer the ultimate experience to your users. In creative arts industry for instance, there are a plethora of plugins you can use to make nice albums, portfolio displays, play music and videos etc. With all these capabilities, you will not just have a beautiful website, but also a functional one which users will cherish to use at all times.

WordPress Has a Large and Robust Community of Users

The WordPress community is very large and extremely robust. The benefit of this is that the platform is constantly getting improved to offer more value and functionalities to the users. In addition to this, you have access to a large pool of professional and passionate developers who will be eager to offer you assistance should you run into any kind of problems with the platform. These are privileges you won’t find with most of the other web development platforms.

WordPress Is the King of Content

If content is king, then WordPress is the king of content as far as websites and the internet are concerned. WordPress makes it a breeze to create, publish, manage and maintain different kinds of content. Such capabilities are important in the creative arts industry which usually involves all manner of content including articles, music, video and images.

WordPress Is Search Engine Friendly

The fact that WordPress handles content in a superb manner makes it a darling to most of the search engines. Since the search engines give a lot of weight to content, WordPress websites will rank much better than sites developed using other content management systems. The benefit of this is increased exposure in the search engines leading to free and targeted organic traffic.

Mobile Friendly

A mobile friendly website is one that can render in mobile devices. WordPress if fitted with this important feature and all site developed with WordPress will render in mobile devices without distorting the content or breaking the links. One great advantage of a having your creative art website mobile friendly is that you will get a lot of visitors from the ever increasing number of mobile users.

A WordPress theme is very instrumental for the overall appearance and the functionalities of your website. For creative artists, a lot of emphasis goes to the aesthetic components of the site but this should not overrule the need for quality features to make the site navigable and provide users with rich experience.

It is therefore important to make certain keen considerations when choosing a WordPress theme for artists. When you choose the right theme, developing the website will be easy and you will also be guaranteed of getting a beautiful and functional website. Consider the following factors to help you choose the right theme for your website:

Choose a Theme Related to the Creative Arts Industry

There are thousands of WordPress themes for almost every kind of niche in the internet. Your ideal theme therefore should be related to the creative industry niche. Though WordPress is quite robust and highly customizable, choosing a theme related to the art industry will save a lot of design time because it comes equipped with features, plugins and designs relevant to the industry. In this manner, you will spend very little time in tweaking the site to suite the particular needs of your users.

Responsive and Mobile Friendly Themes

A responsive website has cross browser compatibility features allowing users to access it using different kinds of browsers. A mobile friendly site on the other hand will render in both desktop and mobile devices. The benefit of these two subtle features is that they will greatly increase the number of people who can access your WordPress website for artists thus increasing your fan and follower bases in the process. In addition to this, your website will be accessible to the millions of users who use mobile devices such as tablets and Smartphone to browse the internet.

Ability to Be Extended with Plugin and Other Extension

The beauty of using WordPress to design creative artist website is that it can be extended with plugins. Your ideal WordPress theme should have room for such extensions. This is one if the ways through which you can customize the website and let it have features and capabilities that will be useful to the potential users of the site. For instance, it should accommodate plugins to let you display stunning portfolios, music albums, videos as well as user interaction features such as discussion or commenting capabilities.

Social Media Integration

The social media is very important in the success of any artist. It provides awesome avenues for connecting with fans and followers in real time. If used in the right manner, it can be very effective in increasing the popularity of a product or an artist in a very short period of time. The right WordPress theme hence should have provisions to easily integrate with the various social media platforms and allow for smooth interaction between the users on the website and the people following the artist on the social media.

Upgrades and Support

Finally, the theme developers should be in a position to provide lifetime upgrade and support for the theme. This is important because the WordPress platform is upgraded on regular basis and there are likely to be issues if you use an obsolete theme in your website. You should also be able to get immediate help from the theme developers should you run into problems during the development process.

The process of making a website has become so easy that anyone can make their own sites. With easy-to-use content management systems like WordPress, all you need is a good looking theme and a few hours to patch up a website.

However, it should be remembered that a professionally looking website is not necessarily professional. For you to have a real website that will portray all the professional aspects of your craft, it is important to use the services of pro web designers. Here are some of the benefits you will get if you decide to travel this road:

Give Your Website a Professional Outlook

The creative arts industry is quite a competitive one and professionalism ought to be observed at every level of interaction with the fans or the followers in your business. Since the website is your face in the online world, it needs to portray the right image which will make visitors see you as a real professional artist and develop interest in your work. Professional web designers have the ability to use the right words, colors, images and designs to make your site have the much needed professional looks. Amateurs or non professionals do not have this ability.

You Will Save Time and Money

The pros are skilled and have been in the industry for a while hence using their skills, expertise and experience will save you a lot of time and money. As someone involved in the creative arts industry, you need to concentrate your energies in providing the absolute best for your fans. A professional designer will thus take less time to give you better output as compared to using non professionals who might end up taking a long time and charge you a lot of money in the process.

You Get Unique and Customized Websites

For a website to offer great benefits to the users, it has to be customized to offer a good experience to the potential users. In the creative arts industry, you need a unique website which will give you all the functionalities you need to connect well with your users. For instance, since a lot of rich media is involved for such a site, it should have the ability to play video and audio without any problems and also display various kinds of images to demonstrate your artistic prowess. Only the professionals have the right set of tools they can use to achieve all these in your website.

Take Advantage of Latest Technology

The technology involved in the web design industry is fluid and changes almost all the time. Professional web designers are constantly watching out for such changes and implementing them in their client’s websites.

To benefit from such technology therefore, you need to let a professional take care of your web design needs. You will benefit from latest technology such as responsive websites, mobile friendly capabilities, advanced search engine optimization amongst others and all these will bring different kinds of benefits to your website.