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Weekly Links Roundup – Content First, Free Plugins, FAQ Plugins, Gallery Comparison

The top website and online marketing links of the week.

One thing that often surprises my design clients is the immediately request for their content when their website project starts. Often, especially for a first website, they have no clue what content they’re going to have. This makes my job as a designer much, much harder. Having all the different types of content that will be on the site up front (at least the types, if not the actual content) is absolutely necessary, as the content drives the design. A site that is all about news articles on the home page will be designed very differently than one with a lot of products to sell, for example. This is why we start the design work with a mockup showing the different types of content that are planned for a given page. To help illustrate, here’s a post about the Content-First Method.

If you’re hiring someone to design and build a new website, do yourself and them a favor and spend some time developing your content strategy before jumping right into the look-and-feel. It will save time and money during the project. Realizing you’re missing important content pages or sections after the design is done or the theme is built can be expensive to remedy.

Here’s a collection of purposeful, generalist free plugins for WordPress sites. I don’t agree with all the choices, but it’s good to get different opinions – there are many plugins to go around for most uses and what works well for one user may not fit the bill for another. The ones in this list I use regularly are Yoast SEO and CoBlocks.

If you get a lot of the same questions over and over from clients and prospects, consider adding an FAQ page. You can collect all those questions and answers in one place and create a very useful resource for customers, while saving yourself time. What’s not to like about that? Here’s a roundup of the 8 Best WordPress FAQ Plugins – I’ve used Accordion FAQ several times and like that one for ease of styling with CSS.

If you’re looking for a gallery plugin for WordPress, two of the most popular are FooGalley and Envira Gallery. I’m a big fan of FooGallery and use it often, but I’ve also heard good things about Envira Gallery. Here is a head-to-head comparison of these two top gallery plugins so you can compare them before deciding.


Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.