My love affair with WordPress started a couple years ago when I worked on my first WordPress site. I was instantly enamored with the flexibility, functionality and ease of use.   The first WordPress website I worked on was a blog, but I could see how a WordPress site could be adapted for almost any website or industry.  I was in love… a few years later and I work almost exclusively with WordPress sites.

Let me share with you the reasons I love WordPress.

Flexibility and Functionality

There are so many ways to modify your WordPress site to achieve all sorts of different functionality.   There are probably 20,000 different plugins you can add to your site:  Add forms, slideshows, galleries, eCommerce, event calendars, search engine optimization (SEO) tools, pop overs, create a members only site and much, much more.  Most of the plugins are even free!

Ease of Use

WordPress is amazingly easy to use.  The WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor is very user friendly and if you have worked with a text editor like Microsoft Word you should have little difficulty crating or editing blogs posts or pages.   There are many WordPress resources available online so answers to your questions are usually just a Google search away.

As a CMS

Many people think of WordPress as a blog, but did you know it can function as a Content Management System (CMS) too?  You don’t even need to make use of the posts (blog) part of WordPress.  Instead, use the pages functionality to create a fully manageable website.  Edit your site, create new pages, update photo galleries, edit your navigation, have multiple users and more.

Beautiful Designs           

I particularly love how you can completely customize the look of your WordPress site by creating a custom theme or modifying an existing theme.   There are thousands of WordPress themes available and if you can’t find one you love you can simply create your own.  Many times I take a client’s existing website design and convert it to WordPress.  They keep  the design they love, but gain all the cool functionality of WordPress. Awesome!

Effectiveness

Often CMS and blog platforms are not search engine friendly.  They use unfriendly urls, don’t let you manage page titles, descriptions or keywords on each page and are ineffective in terms of search engine optimization.  This is not the case with WordPress!   WordPress, with the help of a few plugins, is extremely search engine friendly.   You can set a custom permalink structure (SEO friendly urls), add SEO plugins that let you manage keywords,  create breadcrumbs, sitemaps and much more.   You can use WordPress with confidence knowing your site will be indexed and found on popular search engines.

So try WordPress yourself and fall in love… Or if you already use WordPress, leave me a message below and let me know why you love it too!

Looking for help setting up your WordPress site, or need assistance with your existing WordPress site?  Send me details on your wordpress project.

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The default size of the text editing box for WordPress posts and pages can be rather small making it difficult to see and edit your text.  There are two ways to increase this box; one can be done on the fly and the other changes the default size.

Change the Text box on the fly.

While you are editing your page or post you can simply drag the box and make it bigger.   Place your cursor on the bottom right corner and click and drag the box to the desired size. This change is temporary and the box will return to the smaller size next time.

Change the Text Box Permanently.  

To change the default size of the text box, while in your dashboard go to Settings > Writing.

At the top of the page you will see an option for Size of the post box < enter how many lines you would like the box to be and then press save changes at the bottom of the screen.

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I recently came across a very neat WordPress print plugin, Print Friendly and PDF Button.   It is easy to use and install and lets your visitor choose between printing the document or creating a PDF file.  The site visitor can also choose to delete blocks of text or hide images, ensuring they are getting the information they want.   The site user interface is top notch and very professional looking.

I found the installation very easy as it is a plugin in the WordPress directory so you can search and install right from your dashboard.   The configuration of the settings was straight forward and easy to. I really liked the flexibility of configuration:

• You can choose from several button or text link types or you can add your own graphic.
•  You can also choose to have the button show up on various locations on the page and you can determine which page types show the button (Pages, posts, archives etc) or you can manually insert the code in your template files .

The only drawback was that the plugin displays advertisements during the printing process but you can subscribe to an Ad-free Pro version.   My client found the ad version sufficient as the ads didn’t interfere with her content in any way.

I was very pleased with this plugin and recommend it for anyone wanting to allow site visitors to print their blog posts.

Note: I am in no way associated with this plugin or  it’s creators and I did not recieve any type of payment for my review.

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You were updating WordPress or your plugins and now your website is stuck in maintenance mode – and you are getting a message that says, “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”

What do you do?

You need to access the root directory of your website using FTP and then just delete the .maintenance file that was created during the upgrade.  This will deactivate maintenance mode  – you may need to perform your upgrades again.

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The default permalink setting for WordPress creates ugly URLs for your pages and posts.  Not only are these default URLs ugly but they are not very search engine friendly. They do nothing to help improve your search engine ranking.

URLs from the default setting look something like this:  

http://www.your-domain-name.com/?p=123

What we want is something like this:

http://www.your-domain-name.com/small-business/5-marketing-tips/

Notice how the URL is keyword rich for a site promoting marketing tips for small businesses? URLs like this are more user-friendly and will help your website perform better in searches.

The structure of this permalink is domain-name/blog-category/post-name.   This way if you ensure your categories and blog titles are search engine friendly, you will end up with very effective URLs for your wordpress website.

How to set your permalinks.

It is really easy to set custom permalinks.

Log in to your WordPress Dashboard.

Go to Settings > Permalinks

Click the radial button for Custom Structure and enter /%category%/%postname%/

Then Press Save Changes.  You are done!

Editing Your Post Slug

If you are using the permalink structure I outlined above it is important to edit down the url or post-slug of long posts names.

When you are editing the post or page, you will see the post slug directly under the Page or Post Title. Just click on the edit button and make your changes.

The post-slug will be created automatically, however you may want to edit it down, especially if you have a particularly long title. For example a post called “5 ideas for a more effective business card every small business owner must know” would have a post-slug created that looks like:

5-ideas-for-a-more-effective-business-card-every-small-business-owner-must-know.

This is obviously much too long!

For a more effective and search engine friendly version this post-slug could be edited down to:

effective-business-cards-for-small-business

Note: your post-slug is an identifier for your post so it must be unique.  If you try to use the same post-slug twice a number will be appended to it. (example: effective-business-cards-for-small-business2)

Technical Notes About Permalinks

The only times I have ever come across issues with using custom permalinks it has turned out to be one of two things:

1. The .htaccess file wasn’t writable.
2. WordPress was installed on a Windows Server. (Which I never recommend anyways).

According to WordPress you should be able to use pretty permalinks under the following circumstances:

• Apache web server with the mod_rewrite module
• Microsoft IIS 7+ web server with the URL Rewrite 1.1+ module and PHP 5 running as FastCGI
• Microsoft IIS 6+ using ASAPI_Rewrite
• Lighttpd using a 404 handler or mod_rewrite

For more on Permalinks visit: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

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Facebook just released new share/connect functionality in the form of Send Button.  The send button enables your site visitors to send your content directly to their friends as a private message.   Unlike the share and like buttons, which post to a users wall, the send message may be more effective as it targets individuals or Groups. Presumably the recipients would have more interest in the content, otherwise why would someone send directly to them?

With the facebook send button, you are able to quickly and easy share private content without having to look up email addresses. The button auto suggests your facebook friends and groups.

How to Add a Facebook Send Button

You can implement the send button by itself or you can combine it with the Like button so they show side by side.

The Facebook Developers site has a nifty tool, which allows you create a send Button for your website – Click here.

Want a combined Like/Send Button? Click here

How to add the Facebook Send Button toWordpress

There are already plugins cropping up which will help you add Facebook Send to your site: Facebook Send Button Plugin

Or, if you are more a do-it-yourselfer, here is a little snippet of code that you can add directly to your WordPress Theme.  This uses the get_permalink code so add this code to your loop so that each post can be shared with the send button.

<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#appId=APP_ID&amp;xfbml=1"></script>
<fb:send href="<?php echo urlencode(get_permalink($post->ID)); ?>" font="arial"></fb:send>

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In the past adding videos to your WordPress blog could be tough. You needed to install a plugin and often had to mess around with the YouTube code. If you have upgraded to the most recent version of WordPress, it is now much easier.  You can simply paste the embed code right into the “HTML” tab when you are creating a post.

It is super easy – watch this video to see just how easy. Kudos  to Jack Humphrey, from FridayTrafficReport.com, who created this great video.

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There are over 6500 plugins available for download at WordPress.org – so how do you choose which ones are best for your blog?  It all depends on the purpose, content and style of your blog.  There are shopping cart plugins, gallery plugins, advertisement placement plugins, video plugins, and much more.

I have compiled a short list of the more administrative type plug-ins I use and recommend to my clients. These are the tools that make your blog easier to manage, more search engine friendly.  Regardless of the nature of your blog, these plugins are great tools.

All in One SEO Pack
The All in One SEO Pack is an awesome plugin that automatically generates Meta tags and optimizes your titles OR gives you the flexibility to override your titles and META tags for each individual post or page. The bottom line is, it gives you more control over your blog and can help you achieve higher search engine rankings.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful website traffic analysis tool. Monitor traffic, page views, referrals, bounce rate and so much more!)   Once you sign up for your free Google Analytics account you can used this plugin to easily add the code to your all your WordPress Blog.

Twitter Tools
Twitter tools is a plugin that allows you to connect your blog with your twitter account.  Automatically tweet new posts or compile your tweets into a new blog post.  Use this with the Facebook Twitter application and automatically update twitter and Facebook every time you add a new blog post!

Akismet
Akismet is a must have WordPress plug-in. That is of course, unless you love sorting through a bunch of spam comments.  Akismet helps you manage the spam comments and will save you plenty of time as your blog becomes more popular.

Feedburner Feedsmith
A great feed management tool that will help you track all your RSS subscribers.  Feedburner also offers some nifty tools for publishing your feed to another website, or offering email updates of your RSS Feed.

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Major WordPress supporters/developers are reporting “attacks” on older versions of self hosted WordPress blogs.

If you are running an older version of WordPress, (anything other than version 2.8.4) you should upgrade your installation immediately.

For more information on the attack, upgrading or WordPress security:

• Mashable: WordPress Attack underway: WordPress Users Must Upgrade
• Old WordPress Versions Under Attack
• How to Keep WordPress Secure

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Oh!No! You accidentally deleted or over wrote your WordPress page or blog post and lost all your content and now you are panicking wondering how to get it back.

Don’t fret! There is a super easy way to recover your WordPress page content or blog post to an earlier version of the page.   While in the edit page or post screen, scroll down and you will see a page revisions section.

Select a revision date (by clicking on it) prior to when you lost your content or made your unwanted changes.

This will take you to a page that shows the last version of the page in HTML. Just ignore that HTML gobbly-gook and scroll further down.  You should see a whole bunch of restore dates.

Select the date that you want to restore and then click the restore link and say the magic words, “Alla-Peanut-Butter Sandwiches!”.  And Presto! Your content is back, baby!

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