The Simplest Way To Create A Bilingual Site Using WordPress and WPML

When our clients require a multilingual solution for their website Walnut St. Labs turns to WPML plugin for WordPress. Simply put, WPML extends the functionality of the basic WordPress CMS in a clean and simple way.

Ease of Setup

WPML allows for more than 40 different languages. Although, you will probably not utilize all of them the ability to choose from a wide range of languages makes this a very robust solution with an ease of setup not seen in other translation options. Select which languages you are going to be translating the site to and instantly all the plumbing for each language is already in place — with no coding.   

 

Ease of Use

The greatest feature is the integrated nature of the translation pages with core WordPress features you already know. On one dashboard you can see all translated versions of your pages or posts and their translation statuses. You can access any of the translated pages right from here (see below). Ordinary WordPress users can be made Translators. Translators can access only specific translation jobs which Translation Managers assign to them. And if actually doing the translations is a blocker, you can connect WPML’s powerful translation management with a translation service of your choice. This is very powerful and will keep all translations in sync by alerting your translation service to any changes made to the original language a page was translated from.

 

Fully Integrated Multilingual Website

For our client’s who service multilingual audiences WPML for WordPress has expanded their reach by providing communication options to engage users in their native language.  

 

 

If your site is need of a multilingual solution get in touch with us and we will detail how WPML for WordPress and Walnut St Labs can help you broaden your reach and deepen your engagement across the language barrier.  

Facebook Insights Is One Of The Most Powerful Tools

Facebook Insights Is One Of The Most Powerful Analytics Tools Available

 

In Facebook there are so many data-points available to measure — Likes, Engagement, Reach, Demographic, Etc — Insights helps you to understand how your audience is connecting with your content, how you’re growing and provides you with an overview of how your overall Facebook strategy is performing.

 

Half the battle of making sense of data is clearly defining what you want to accomplish. Next, is knowing where you can find measurable data to track your progress, hone your tactics, and ultimately achieve your goal . Here are just a few of the key highlights of what you’ll know from FB Insights:

1. Where your Page Likes came from,

2. What’s your reach and what factors affect it.

3. What people did on your Page; Who liked, saw, or engaged with your Page.

4. In Messenger, understanding your Response times and analytics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Local Tab: Local Businesses. Minds Blown.

In this tab, you have information about the foot traffic in your area, demographic information about people near your place, and percentage of people nearby who saw your Facebook ads.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Action Tab: Know Your Audience

The Actions on Page tab allows you to understand what people do when they are on your Page. A few actions that Facebook considered are clicking on “Get Directions”, clicking on your phone number, clicking on your website, and clicking on your action button.

5 Reasons to Run your Site on WordPress

1. The search engines love WordPress

Matt Cutts, software engineer for Google says, “WordPress automatically solves a ton of SEO issues.” The WordPress platform is structured in a way that is search-engine friendly and there are many third-party plugins available that let site owners fine tune their message to be even more crawlable by Google.

  • Images – Google can’t “see” a picture or photo. WordPress allows text describing the image (tags) to be optimized so Google can find the images and know what they are about
  • Page load speed. Google knows that people will leave a website if they have to wait for pages to load. Out of the box, WordPress is a fast loading framework. The site owner still needs to make sure they are not overloading pages with tons of large images and bloated-code, but as long as best practices are followed the page will load quickly.
  • Social media – Google wants to know that a website has fresh content and regular visitors. Having social media accounts with frequent posts and many visitors sends traffic to the website is an important indicator for Google. WordPress has many options to integrate social media accounts with the website.

2. WordPress is free and open source.

When you build your website on WordPress, you are not locked in with a developer or third party. It is your choice where you host your website and you can use the platform however you choose. Because of this flexibility, WordPress is a very popular platform. 1 out of 4 websites on the internet is built on WordPress. This makes for a very large community of developers, site owners, and users. There are many opportunities to get answers to questions, share ideas, and even collaborate on projects. Also, there is no shortage of options to hire someone to help with site design, content writing, or even have a website completed from beginning to end.

Wordpress is open source and easy to use

3. WordPress has plugins. Many plugins.

A plugin is a piece of software that can be added to your WordPress site to add functionality. As of this writing, there are 49,285 plugins available in the WordPress directory. Many of these plugins are completely free, some are paid (either one-time fee or subscription model), and some follow the freemium model. A freemium plugin usually has a scaled-down free version that still offers much of the functionality you are looking for. You can test out the plugin and decide if you want to upgrade to the premium version. This may unlock additional features, automate functions, remove watermarks or plugin branding, and provide additional value. Here are some examples of the features that plugins can provide

  • Social Media – Integration with social networks, allowing users to share your content
  • Forms – Allow users to contact you, sign up for newsletters, make payments, and more.
  • Security – Provide higher levels of security for the website, users’ data, and assets.
  • SEO – Allow for fine tuning of content so that Google and other search engines find your site.
  • Advanced Functionality – Everything from membership sites to downloading ebooks to interactive calendars. If there is a need for it, there is most likely a plugin for it.

4. Themes

One of the key features of using WordPress is how it uses themes. WordPress installs “out of the box” with a default theme. A theme allows the website owner to make changes to the appearance of the site–colors, fonts, layout–without changing the core functionality of the site or needing to dive into the code. When the WordPress framework needs to be updated, it won’t write over the changes made to the theme. Think of it this way: if the WordPress system is a car, think of the theme as the paint job. While this is a simplistic analogy, it is a good example of how themes work. A more thorough explanation would also include how a framework can be installed onto wordpress, and why we would use parent and child themes. But we’ll leave that discussion for the next post.

5. Built for the mobile web

More than 50% of all searches are conducted on mobile devices. We’ve all gone to websites on our phone that were too small to read, hard to use, and loaded so slowly that we ended up leaving and going somewhere else. If your website doesn’t look good or work correctly on a mobile device, your visitors are going to leave. A responsive website means that the text, photos, and layout will automatically resize to look good on a desktop, tablet, or phone. And with so many responsive themes available for WordPress, it is easy for a website owner to build a website that looks and works great.

Wordpress is built for mobile

WordPress is the most popular content management system on the web. Its ease of use, countless options, and versatile design make it a compelling choice for any business owner. If you would like to discuss running your website on WordPress, give us a shout at (610) 541-2026 or send us an email.

Utilizing Video for Wheelhouse Analytics with Jim Sueffert

We talked with Jim Sueffert, Senior Partner at Wheelhouse Analytics.

How do Walnut St. Labs videos differ from what you’ve done in the past?

Well the video in the past; very scripted, very planned, more like theater. The videos we’ve produced; very natural. What pops into my head [and] hopefully comes out [are] sincere, meaningful, smaller bites. And I think people get a clearer feeling and message as to what what we’re trying to say; where we’re trying to go.

Can video change the culture of financial services?

I think when you put an unscripted video out there with hopefully people that you know, know the subject matter and you don’t have a script version if you will I think the audience can tell pretty quickly whether or not the individuals real. And once they’re for real that tends to lead to maybe a face – at least a phone call – and then maybe a face-to-face meeting and then that thread continues to be bold hopefully in a positive direction.

What dies video accomplish for Wheelhouse Analytics?

I think for establishing credibility you can look at a resume but I think the video is a better medium nowadays than paper.

How did you take your video media to the next level?

Walnut St. Labs actually took us to this place we we needed help you know messaging, we need to be crisp, concise to generate the velocity and they did it.

 

Learn more about Jim and his team at Envesnet Analytics.

Founder/CEO Chris Dima Featured in Mainline Today’s 16 Most Daring Entrepreneurs

Excerpt from Main Line Today:

Part innovation center, part work-space and part auditorium, Walnut St. Labs is a regional epicenter of tech entrepreneurialism. It hosts networking events, brainstorming sessions, and talks from the region’s most successful tech entrepreneurs. “We created an ecosystem, the purpose of which is to build and generate ideas,” says founder and CEO Chris Dima.

That wasn’t Dima’s goal when he got to Walnut St. Labs in 2013. Then, it was just shared office space. Dima was working for Economy.com while expanding his own software-development and marketing company when the lease expired. Five other entrepreneurs worked in the building. “No one wanted to, so I signed the lease myself,” says Dima. “I created a logo and hung a piece of paper on the front door with tape. Walnut St. Labs was born. Lesson learned: You can wait for other people to lead, or lead yourself.”

Grants from the Chester County Economic Development Council helped Dima transform the former taxi garage into an innovation center. “You need a clubhouse where like-minded people can gather,” he says.

In early 2016, Dima moved Walnut Street Labs to a new space—still in West Chester and with the same vibe. “I want to nurture tech entrepreneurship in the suburbs—and Chester County, specifically,” he says. “That’s who I am, and that’s the story I want to tell.”

Check It Out