Hey guys, How's it Going?
My name is Jason, and
we're always listening to your questions
here at WebTegrity.
And one that we've been receiving a lot lately
I wanted to do a video about.
Now, we're always listening to your questions
on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube
but this one came in on the live stream
that we do on YouTube
on Tuesdays at 11 am Central Standard Time.
So that's a great resource for you guys
if you're looking to ask questions in a
live environment,
and get an answer right away.
This one had to do with Anchor links.
Now we've done a resource before
on how to make anchor links, and
if you don't know what that is -
That's where you have a link on your page
that shoots to another area of your page.
So we do have the resource on that
if you do not know how to do that.
A question that was laid on top of that is
"How do we get it to scroll smoothly?"
And I'm going to use an example
using one of our current clients.
Here we have KCM Consulting.
They're a consulting agency that
does a lot of different services.
And to organize the information
we thought it would be best to have
a nice breathable, open area that speaks
directly to the client that they're going for,
and when they click on "Our Services"
it shoots to another area of the home page
using an anchor link
in which they list out their services
and each one of these shoot to a page
that's more built for that particular service
as far as Search Engine Optimization.
It's a great idea - this concept works very well
for people that have a lot of different services,
but this anchor link is kind of a jarring experience
like when you click that - look at how it just
it shoots right down.
And if you're on the desktop, it may make sense
Your screen might be large enough for you to
understand what's going on, but if you're
on the phone, I want to show you what this looks like.
Let me pull you back here into full screen.
And here I am on KCM Consulting's website on the phone
and it looks great, but when I click "Our Services"
it just shoots right down. It's like a foreign experience.
I'm in a completely new area, and for it to scroll
more smoothly
could be considered a better user experience.
And a lot of people are looking for how to do that.
Now if you've been looking how to do it,
and you've found this video,
you've probably come across
something like this.
And you're like - "Woah - wait a second.
(laugh) I have to write jQuery?"
And that can be a little bit more difficult
than what you're looking for.
jQuery will certainly complete this task for you,
but not everybody wants to mess with this
kind of complexity,
and they're looking for something more simple.
And I have the solution for you.
Turns out there is, in fact, a very good plugin
to achieve this task.
And you'll find a lot of different plugins.
I mean you can find plugins for anything
within WordPress.
But a lot of the plugins involving smooth scroll
come with unnecessary options.
What we really like about this plugin here at WebTegrity
is it's very lightweight.
And we're all about building things lightweight.
So - I mean here even with this theme
it's a custom built theme.
We only have, up until before we chose to go
with this plugin, we only had two different plugins.
Advanced Custom Fields & Gravity Forms
because we love Gravity Forms here
at WebTegrity as do many other people.
However, we're also going to add this jQuery Smooth Scroll.
It's very simple, and what's great about it is -
yes, you do need to use jQuery to achieve this task,
but that's all this plugin is doing.
It's not adding in unnecessary WordPress
dashboard menus.
It's not adding in all of this code that's simply
unnecessary - all of these options
that you're simply not going to use.
You just want your anchor links to scroll smoothly
and you don't want this much -
any other complexity added on top of it,
and that's exactly what this plugin is about.
It's called jQuery Smooth Scroll by
Blog Synthesis, and that's even the way
he advertises it.
This person - I assume it's a male, but it could
just as easily be a female,
they already know that people are looking for
something that's very simple.
They even say, "All CSS & Javascript files are
compressed to score high in Google page score.
This is exactly what we're looking for,
and I'm going to show you how simple it is.
We just installed it.
It took about two seconds.
Let's hit activate,
and I want to show you again what this is like,
just so you can see it side-by-side.
Let's look at the experience when you click on it
right now - Kind of a jarring jump down,
and let's reactivate with the plugin active,
and let's click the button again and see what changes.
It's this smooth scroll.
We didn't need to activate the plugin and go into
a menu then figure out all
sorts of options. We just activated it.
And then the nature way you do anchor links
within HTML is already transferred into this
smooth scroll functionality which is outstanding.
As an added bonus, and you can't see it because
my face is on the side of the screen -
Let me go ahead and remove that.
As an added bonus
you get this nice, beautiful, little arrow
to the side.
and when you click that
it smooth scrolls right back up to the top.
And I do want to show you guys -
let me go back into full screen.
How that just completely improves the
experience on the phone.
So let me refresh the website here
on the phone,
and let me go up here
and let me see if you can see that?
You can kind of see that.
Let me click "Our Services"
Look at the smooth scroll
much better experience,
and you still have that arrow in the
lower right-hand corner very subtle
when we click it
we're scrolled right back up to the top.
So this is a very simple solution.
Very lightweight.
It's using in the exact same code
that you'd have to write yourself in jQuery,
and inserting it into your site in a very
minimal fashion.
Highly recommended.
Hope this answers your questions -
if this is what you're searching for.
If you need more help with WordPress
go to WebTegrity.com.
We have all kinds of resources here, guys,
for all kinds of questions.
Just go to our resources area and chances are
if you have the question - we've been asked it before
and we might already have a resource for you.
So please check this out.
Kori just did a video on the new Revolution Slider
which if you've used the Revolution Slider -
it's a little cryptic at this point.
And if you're looking to go deeper into WordPress
we have a couple of different options for you there.
We have online classes that you can purchase
that will really help you dive deeper.
And if you're local to San Antonio,
you can actually come to one of local classes
where we'd love to teach you more about WordPress,
and answer your questions.
So please use this resource - much of it is free,
and it's for you guys.
Other than that - I appreciate you guys coming by
to check out this video.
Please subscribe to our YouTube Channel to get more
tips on WordPress in the future.
Other than that -
Good luck developing WordPress, guys.
