Before we start, I want to ask you: Have you ever heard about the 80/20 rule? This rule states that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts (80/20 is just a rule of thumb, it can be 90/10, 70/30 and so on.) My point is, the same principle applies for making WordPress faster and safer. Spend several minutes, change some things, and reap big results. Those will be covered below.
How to Make WordPress Faster

When it comes to making WordPress faster, 2 things matter most:
- Hosting
- Optimizing WordPress

a) Hosting – How to Choose a great WordPress host

99.9% of webhosts support WordPress. So, when it comes to the question ‘Which is the best WordPress hosting solution’ you’re actually asking: ‘Which is the best hosting solution?’ Honestly, it’s very hard to give an answer to this question. The best answer would be, it depends (on your needs.)

There are some research sites like Netcraft that provide monthly reports on the most reliable hosting solutions. However, most of the hosts there, are for businesses and cost over $100 monthly. On the other hand, you can go with the most popular solutions (following the logic: if they’re popular and a brand, they must be at least above average.)

Another thing you definitely want to do before deciding to deal with a web host is to check out the business via BBB. In my experience, there seems to be a high correlation between the BBB rating for the company and the actual reliability that the company will offer.

To get to the point, which hosts do I recommend?

* Hostgator.com (I personally use it for more than a year). HostGator are ThePlanet resellers (and ThePlanet is ranked as one of the most reliable hosts by NetCraft is some of their reports). Hostgator also has A+ BBB grade.
* GoDaddy.com, has an A+ BBB grade and I heard very positive reviews from friends. They aren’t mentioned by Netcraft in many of their reports, though.
* Hosting4less.com – I was surprised to see this company consistently ranking in the top 10 on Netcraft monthly reports, after investigating them I found they have an “A” grade from BBB and existing for quite a long time. So all data indicates they’re great.

Please be aware I haven’t mentioned many well-known hosts in this list. I was shocked to see that many of them (I don’t want to mention any names) aren’t even BBB accredited businesses!

b) Optimizing WordPress

By optimizing WordPress, I mean caching and compressing EVERYTHING (CSS files, the WordPress database and so on.) Obviously, you want some automated solution to do all this for you.

Okay, so we need a caching plugin. Many people prefer WP-Super-Cache. However, my tests have shown very small or almost no significant improvement in performance when using this plugin. I just used this tool and measured my blog’s performance before and after I got the plugin enabled.

A static home page is when you replace the default page – which shows your most recent blog posts – with another page. This is a great option if you want to create a splash page to capture new visitors, and feed them more information.

The Steps
If you’re interested in having a static homepage to replace your latest blog posts, here is how you do it.

1. Go to the “Pages” tab and pick out or create a new page that you want to be your homepage.
2. Set this page to the “default template”. (Template settings are found under the “Attributes” section in the right side-bar.)
3. Create another new page which will be the new home of your blog posts. Give it a title of “blog” or something similar.
4. Now, go into the “Reading” tab under the “Settings” panel.
5. Choose the option titled “A static page”.
6. Select the page you want to display as your homepage from the first drop down menu.
7. Choose the page you titled “Blog” under the “Posts page” drop down.
8. Save the changes.

There you have it. You now have a more informative static homepage instead of only showing your recent posts.

If you want the latter, then close out of this article right now, but if your aim is to keep up user engagement as they reach the botom of your pages, then you must keep reading.

Sections to Include

Legal Terms – This isn’t necessarily going to keep readers on your blog, but a copyright notice and any other legal terms your site has is very important to include on your blog. Common placement of legal terms are in the far left section of the footer, or below the main content of a footer.

Recent Comments – Including recent comments in your footer can be a great way to encourage user discussion. A comment can be a great way to catch a readers attention and pull them into the discussion as they reach the bottom of the page.

Plugin: Recent Comments

Favorite Posts – As your blog grows, and you build up a large collection of articles, some of your best may get lost in the jumble, buried on page 10 and never to be seen by many of your new readers. By including your favorite posts in your footer, you will be making them visible to everyone, and displaying some of your best writing.

Popular Posts – I prefer to put this section in the sidebar, but it works well in a footer as well if your sidebar is already  full. Like a favorite posts section, having your most popular posts displayed will put your best content forward.

Plugin: Most Popular Posts

Random Posts – This is an excellent way to recycle your old posts and make sure they don’t get lost in the depths of your archives. It’s also a way to always have fresh content rotating on display.

Plugin: Random Posts

Page Navigation – Not only should your pages be listed in the navigation bar on the top of your blog, but they should also be included in the footer. This will eliminate the problem of users having to scroll all the way back to the top of a page if they want to contact you, read your about page, etc.

A Brief “About” section – Let  your readers know who you are in your footer. This is a prominent place to tell about yourself because it shows up on every page and post. Make it brief, and be sure to link it to your “About” page, where readers can find out even more about you and your blog.

Links – The footer is the perfect place to link to any relevant sites. Although this takes readers away from your site, the site your linking to usually will exchange links with you, so you will ultimately benefit from including a link section on your blog.

Something to Remember

Although all of these things are great to have in a footer, you shouldn’t try to cram every single one of them into it. It is best to pick out three or four of these things and integrate them into your design. No one likes an overly crowded footer because it can take away from your main content. On the opposite end though, a bare footer can leave readers with nothing to do when they reach the bottom of a page but leave your site. Remember, balance is key.

What About You?

What do you think the most important things to include in a blog footer are?

By and large, this release is a plugin developers release with lots of new APIs and abstraction. However, there are significant additions for theme designers and users as well. Technosailor has written a really useful article: 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.9. Take a look and get ready for WordPress 2.9 in the near future!

WordPress.org and WordPress MU Wedding

WordPress MU and WordPress.org are all set to tie up with each other. This feature will come handy specially for large blog networks. It is an add-on for the existing users which means it won’t hurt them if they don’t want to use it. The upgrade process will be smooth and won’t cause any difficulties to existing users.

Choose Username and Password while Installing

Earlier when you do new installation WordPress automatically choose ‘admin‘ as default username and generate a random password, however in 3.0 it allows you to choose custom username and password while installing WordPress.

New Default Theme

WordPress 3 has been packaged with a new theme called ‘Twenty Ten’. This new theme is really outstanding and minimalist at the same time. Twenty Ten has some outstanding features such as Custom Background, Custom Header, Simple and Clean Look, Multi Widget Areas Supported, Two-Columns and Drop Down Menu.

Custom Background

WordPress 3.0 now adds support for custom background for themes. It enables ‘Background’ option in WordPress admin ‘Appearance’ tab.

Custom Post Types

This feature is due since WordPress 2.9 it allows you create different post types such as Portfolio, Products, Reviews etc.

Navigation Menu

This feature allows you to create different menu items containing Categories, Pages, External or Internal Link. It also support a widget so that you can place these menus in your sidebar as widget.

Author Templates

Earlier we had category specific templates which we use to develop category based templates using category-slug.php now WordPress 3 brings the same functionality for author based templates now you can create author based template files such as ‘author-chef.php’.

Designing a navigation menu is not easy. The designer needs to understand the site structure before start. Furthermore, designer needs to make sure the navigation menu can cope for future needs. One of the example is the number of elements in the menu increase in future.

In this article, you will see 45 inspiring, user-friendly and well-designed navigation menus. Although they may not necessary suit your design, but we hope these navigation menus can bring inspiration to our readers.

http://www.webdesignbooth.com/45-inspiring-navigation-menus-that-you-must-see/