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WordPress – a counter argument

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WordPress WebsitesHere at Locally, we use WordPress as the basis for great business websites. We work with a growing range of clients, all local businesses making their presence felt online too.

We work with start-ups through to larger companies who offer a range of high quality products and services locally, as well as nationally and, in the vast majority of cases, globally too.

We know that websites need to be creative showcases that have high quality content, great graphics that are not overdone and that the whole thing needs to search engine optimised.

We also know that every business is different and so every website needs to be different; what suits one free school in one area of the country will not suit another free school is another area. Businesses may occupy the same trade or industry, but it doesn’t mean they offer the same product or service, in the same way.

So, we don’t have ‘templates’ as such, although we have an innate understanding of what a business could want and, working alongside our clients, we create great websites that work.

WordPress – not everyone’s cup of tea

WordPress is an open source platform, which, without getting too technical, means that brilliantly technically minded people (like us here at Locally!) can create rather wonderful and spectacular websites for businesses (for anyone, in fact). Associated with a  vibrant and fabulous blogging movement, you can create, with the addition of plug-ins and design creativity, a bespoke WordPress website.

But it’s not everyone’s cup of tea as highlighted in a recent article we came across and so, we think it is only fair to present the other side of the argument and why WordPress can create fabulous, creative websites that really do work…

The criticisms levelled at WordPress websites were:

  • WordPress sites are not ‘truly’ able to be updated or created in a bespoke way – not true! And we think we have a growing portfolio that points to evidence to the contrary. There is also mention that people who create such websites do not know much about code and that they hitch a ride on other developers, using their ideas and creations. Here at Locally we add to the WordPress community, as well as share ideas. Since when has this been a bad thing?
  • Plug ins – as an open and sharing community, developers from across the web community create plug ins that others can use of their websites to enhance it. Detractors suggest that these plug ins often conflict and break, suggesting that the security of the website will be compromised. With all the recent hacking scandals and dodgy photos making their way online this is, to all intents and purposes, playing on people’s vulnerability. With the right technical help from a company like us, these breakages and conflicts in plug ins can be avoided.
  • Security – continuing with the theme of security, some industry experts also suggest that the open community behind WordPress is also its greatest weakness. As the platform is written by and shared by large numbers of people, suggestions are it is easier to hack and therefore, your WordPress website could be compromised. Funny how the recent hacking scandals have not affected WordPress but other open source programs…
  • Every site is the same – again, a common misconception we feel around WordPress is that people assume that because there are thousands of themes to choose from that this means every website looks and feels the same; we disagree. We do create bespoke WordPress websites. Simple.
  • Lacking in originality – another criticism of WordPress is the perceived lack of originality and that search engines, such as Google, will note this, giving such website a ‘miss’ when it comes to page 1 rankings. This doesn’t seem to affect Beyonce’s WordPress site… hers seems far from lacking in originality and ranking. In fact, research any major topic online and you will come across many bespoke websites that use WordPress and do not seem to struggle from lack of originality.
  • Updating – apparently the penchant for updating WordPress every few months is an issue that some find deplorable. We think that keep your website fresh, with all the latest technical wizardry a rather fabulous thing…
  • SEO – ah, the old search engine optimisation argument. In fact, we think our earlier point about WordPress websites figuring high in the rankings more than blows this point out of the water…

For those that knock WordPress we think you are trying to kick an open door; it is a futile exercise! Take another look at what this platform can offer your business.

The latest update of WordPress, 3.9 ‘Smith’, changes the editing experience, but do you know how?

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WordPress 3.9 was released last week and it has some major changes, mainly focused on the usability of the editor. We feel these improvements will help make the WordPress editing experience easier, especially regarding images, which has traditionally been a bit tricky.

Editor

The WordPress editor has been upgraded to use the TinyMCE version 4 editor (from TinyMCE 3 ), this has editor multiple improvements.

The first set of changes to note is in the actual icons on the editor ribbon.

Below is the 3.8.3 editor ribbon

3.8icon

and this is the 3.9 editor ribbon

3.9icons

First the ‘expanded’ mode icon moves over to the far right.

A new ‘horizontal row’ icon is added, this will insert a horizontal divider.

The ‘Insert from WordPress’ icon completely disappears, this is because the new editor is meant to be able to handle copy and paste from Word directly, creating a much cleaner markup. We still recommend that for best consistency across your site, you only paste as text and then apply formatting via the WordPress editor, but if you are confident in the consistency of fonts and styles in your word document, this might make your life easy if you have a lot of formatted word documents you need to insert.

And finally, the ‘Text Colours’ icon no longer has the ability to specify completely custom colours, instead you are restricted to 40 standard colours. We believe this is a good move as it remove the temptation to have too many colour variations. Of course custom colours can be created using HTML and CSS, but in general for your site to look good, it is best to stick to the site’s predefined styles.

Images

WordPress 3.9 has made multiple improvements to the way the media manager interacts with the editor, all designed to make image handling a bit easier.

Drag and Drop

Now you can simply drag and drop images from your computer into the editor workspace.  Once ‘dropped’ the media manger will open up where you can set options and captions etc.

drag_and_drop_images

Re-sizing images

Now you can resize images in the editor workspace by dragging a corner or side out to the desired size.

image_resize

Image Editor

The image editor has been restyle to be more intuitive and accessible.  When you edit an image from the editor workspace the panel is simplified, and has a preview, but importantly also has a button to click through to the image editor, which whilst having the same features as before (crop, rotate, scale etc) is much cleaner and obvious.

image_editor

image_edit_2

Gallery Preview

In WordPress 3.8  a Gallery in the editor just showed as a grey box. This meant you couldn’t easily see what images were included.  In 3.9 the Gallery now shows these images in a preview style in the editor workspace. Of course this isn’t WYSIWYG but a big step forward.

3.9_gallery

Other Changes in 3.9

There are several other changes in WordPress 3.9, but we won’t go into detail here as this article is focused on the user editing experience. Hover changes include introducing media playlists for video and audio, improving the theme selection screen and adding widget previews to the ‘customiser’

You can watch the official WordPress TV 3.9 video here.

Adding code to WordPress widgets.

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Only certain levels of user can add complex code to their site, if you are at that level then it is relatively simple to add code snippets to your WordPress website by using the Text widget. (for our clients we recommend they talk to us before adding extra code ). Each WordPress theme should have one or more sidebars defined, and each of these sidebars can be used to contain multiple widgets.

A common request is to add some custom code to a WordPress website, and one way to achieve this is using the Text widget in a an appropriate sidebar.

In this video I will demonstrate adding Twitter widget code into a Footer sidebar of a WordPress site.

WordPress Custom Menus – Adding a top level menu item

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menu1WordPress moved from a blogging platform to a CMS and website building tool when it released its custom menu feature back in June 2010 with WordPress 3.0.

Custom menus give easy control over the structure of page menus.  Over the releases since 3.0 WordPress have improved the usability of the Custom Menu administration screen, found in Appearances>Menus.

Whilst being easy to use in many ways with drag and drop positioning, there are one or two tricks that are not obvious.

This short video demonstrates how to create a menu item, with sub menu items, where the top level menu is not actually a page.

Transcript:

“On this demo WordPress website, I have a fairly typical menu structure, with a Home page, About page, Services and Contact.

Under Services I have a couple of pages, one called First Services and Second Service.

But this is not actually how I want the site to look, because I don’t want the top menu item to link to a page at all, I just want it to be a holding menu item. So to achieve that, we need to go into the menu editor, and you will see here the typical setup with each item, Home , About, Services all pointing to page.

What we need to do is create a dummy menu item called Services, and we use the LINKS for this.

Now it is important that we put in the hash (#) or gate (#) symbol into the URL otherwise there will be problems on touch screen devices if you just leave this blank. And then we put in the text that we want to have for the menu item, and we add that to the menu. You will see that we have a custom menu item at the bottom here for Services.

We no longer need the page Services one, so we click on the little arrow there and then we remove Services.

Drag into the right position, drag these across into the correct place, and we save the menu.

With that done, we return back to the main site, we can see that the menus work as we expect, but if we click on Services nothing happens, but click on First Services we go to a page.

Obviously you can go and tidy up and remove your unneeded page, Services, leaving you with the menu structure as you need it to be.”

WordPress 3.8 update

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If you are currently subscribing to our on going maintenance and support plan, you may notice that the admin area of your website has had a bit of a refresh.

WordPress has recently released version 3.8 and after lots of testing from us, we have now updated all supported websites, you can watch the official video below:

CaptureKey updates:

Modern Design

WordPress needed a bit of a facelift, the grey gradients and dull icons quickly became outdated and proved to be not very user friendly.

overview

Edit on the go

You can now edit pages, posts and more on mobile and tablet devices with ease. Before it was a bit of a thankless task, this update is arguably one of the most significant as smart phones and tablets become more popular.

responsive

8 admin colour schemes

By default we have our own admin panel called ‘Easy Mode’. We introduced this as WordPress was simply too grey and difficult to navigate. If you want to keep using Easy Mode you can, however, if you fancy trying out the new WordPress admin interface you can change your profile settings.

colors

Images courtesy of WordPress

WordPress Blogging tips – issues with layout & format

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As part of the support we provide our clients we get a vast array of questions relating to WordPress, but there is one that keep cropping up which if you don’t know how to resolve can be very frustrating, so we thought we’d write a few words explaining how to fix it.

If you find that the bullet points are out of alignment you can’t get any breaks in between your paragraphs & that you cut and pasted from a word document (which most do)  this is more than likely your problem.

It’s simple to fix; > delete the blog post content > cut and paste again from word with one difference > Click on the ‘w’  paste into the box and insert.

Doing this will strip out all the unnecessary word press code which will mangle your blog post.

WordPress Blog format problem

Pasting into WordPress from Word