Tips ‘n’ tricks | Web Development Articles from York web designers Semlyen IT

Anyone installing a WordPress blog should take note of these plugins. Some of them are essential, some of them are just handy. They have all been tested and found to be compatible with the new release WordPress 3.0. We will add or remove plugins as and when needed.

Akismet
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/
This one comes with WordPress ‘out of the box’, but it is well worth activating as it is basically an anti spam tool. It simply requires that you enter an API key, available by registering on the WordPress site or the Akismet site. The API keys are reusable across domains so you need only do it once for all your blogs.

All in one SEO pack
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
Pretty essential for any blog really, this adds meta description and meta keyword tags to your template (which seem to be missing from some themes) as well as canonical URLs. Title, Description and Keywords tags are automatically written, based on the plugin’s settings. All these can be overwritten individually for each post and there are a number of other useful settings, such as excluding pages and adding noindex for archives.

Google Analytics for WordPress
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/
You may choose just to add your Analytics code to the footer in your template, but using this plugin gives you more control over what data is tracked – for example you can exclude admin visits. It also supports AdSense tracking and Urchin.

No 404 Errors
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/no-404-errors/
There is a bug that affects some shared hosting, whereby rather than displaying 404 Errors, raw html is sent to the browser. This clever plugin changes 404 errors to 301 errors and redirects to a custom WordPress page.

TinyMCE Advanced
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tinymce-advanced/
This adds buttons to WordPress’s limited TinyMCE setup and also allows you to control what buttons are used with a drag-and-drop interface. It also has the option to import styles from the stylesheet and to stop WordPress’s annoying habit of stripping out <p> and <br> tags, making it easier for users to add spacing in a post.

Breadcrumb Trail
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/breadcrumb-trail/
Some designs require a ‘breadcrumb’ navigation, showing you the route you took from the homepage to the current page. They can be very useful, since it’s easy to get lost when navigating a complex blog. WordPress doesn’t supply this feature out of the box, but this plugin gives you a breadcrumb trail function that you can add anywhere in your theme. It’s simple to customize via the plugins files.

Add Lightbox
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/add-lightbox/
This automatically adds rel=”lightbox” to all images linked to in your posts and pages, grouped by post ID. You have to add the javascript files manually. The code can easily be modified in order to use your preferred image pop up script, for example, colorbox.

WP-Syntax
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-syntax/
Great for posts of a technical nature, this allows you to highlight code by wrapping it in ‘pre’ tags and specifying a language from the GeSHi library, for example, XML, PHP, CSS.

NextGEN Gallery
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery/
WordPress already has a pretty useful gallery function, whereby each post or page can have a number of pictures associated and displayed in a simple Gallery layout. NextGEN gallery allows you to insert any Gallery, or a selection of Galleries (an Album) into any post or page. It also comes with a number of Javascript slide shows already set up (some of which require  you to install the javascript files manually) and the ability to add watermarks, arrange your pictures and albums, create RSS Feeds, add photos to the sidebar etc. For any blog where images are an essential part of their content, you should be using this. It is a little daunting when you first try to use it but you’ll soon get the hang of it.

WP-Print
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-print/
Adds a button to the bottom of every post and/or page that generates a printable version of your content. You can choose whether to display comments, images and links or not.

Social Bookmarking
There are many social bookmarking plugins and it is an essential feature for blogs and indeed any website these days. There are the well known buttons such as AddThis and ShareThis that you will see all around the web, as well as the specific WordPress plugins. These add a clickable list of social networking icons to the bottom of each post. The ones we tend to use are Social Bookmarks, which you can see on this site, and Sociable, which I feel is the better choice as there are more sites to choose from and the icons are a little nicer, plus the user can manually disable it for individual posts. Another one which I rather like is Sexy Bookmarks, although this isn’t for all sites. At the end of the day there are many to choose from and its up to you to find one you like.

A couple of handy tips

That’s it for now although I will leave you with this: Although most of these plugins have settings to customize the look and functionality they can still be quite restricted. However remember that CSS can do some pretty clever things and in many cases the plugin’s code itself is quite straightforward, so it’s worth having a little play around to get things just as you like.

Finally, before you hand over your blog to the client you should take a look at SitePoint’s admin customization tips – part 1 and part 2. Another little tip is to log in as your client, go to the edit post window, open up the second row of editor buttons (top right button) and arrange the panels on this page so that the ones they are more likely to need are at the top. WordPress remembers how you had your edit page set up and this stops clients wondering where things are when they log in for the first time.

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We don’t really do much tech support here, but we always try to be helpful to our clients when they’re experiencing problems.

Whatever the problem is, and whether it’s with hardware, software or a website, there are a few things you can do to help the techies of this world help you.

The golden rule, of course, is: don’t panic! And before you turn-it-off-and-on-again -

1. Grab that error message!
When something goes wrong, make a note of what it says. That error report may not mean anything to you but it will to someone. If it’s on a web page, chances are you’ll be able to copy-and-paste it into an email. A half-remembered error report can confuse the issue no end.

2. What’s going on?
A clear, step-by-step description of what you were doing when you got the error helps enormously. If you got the error on a webpage, let us know exactly which one it was – copy the contents of the address bar into an email. If you were uploading a file, send us the file. If it was something on your computer, remember all the programs you had open at the time, and tell us the last thing you did before the error showed up.

3. Your machine
It’s vital to know what you’re using – which browser, which operating system. Is it Windows, Linux, or Mac? Are you using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or Opera? The first thing a techie will try to do is replicate the error. Chances are it’s not something that happened when they tested it, so what’s the difference between your machine and theirs?

Here’s a great resource to get all this info quickly: www.supportdetails.com from Imulus, who earn serious brownie points for this site. It gives you all the details about your own system and lets you download them as a CSV or PDF, or just send it all in an email straight to your local techies.

4. Even better: show us!
The best you can do: as soon as anything goes wrong, grab that screen! On a Windows machine, pressing Print Screen (often labelled “PrtScn”) actually does just that – it grabs the current screen and puts it in the Windows clipboard. You can then paste it into an image file and save it using MS Paint (under ‘Accessories ‘) or – your favourite and mine – IrfanView, the free image viewer. In Mac OS X, I’m reliably informed, Command-Shift-3 will take a screenshot and save it as a file on your desktop.

Send this screenshot to your helpful techie friends and it’ll help them no end.

This has the added benefit of showing us what you’ve got open and what operating system you’re using. It’ll tell us – roughly – what version of what browser you’re using, and which operating system. They tell a thousand words, you know!

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For any business, staying in touch with potential and existing customers regularly is very important, and the most cost-effective way to do this is via email.

However, it’s important to have an efficient system through which to sent the emails. Email marketing campaigns, if just done manually, can be extremely time-consuming. Managing a list of email addresses, deleting those who choose to unsubscribe and those addresses which are no longer functional, on top of creating the newsletter itself, can all add up to hours, or even days.

Many small business start their mailing lists in this way, but as their lists grow they find them increasingly difficult to manage. Many people imagine that upgrading to an automated system that produces professional emails – perhaps even personalised to match their website – might be complicated, expensive, or both. However, this is not the case!

We work with a email marketing system called Campaign Monitor, which is cost effective and extremely flexible, even for relatively small mailing lists. We can design email newsletters to match your site, which you can either take as a template for creating your own newsletters, or just leave it all to us.

As well as boosting your image with a professionally designed email newsletter, Campaign Monitor takes all the fuss out of managing an email list. Every email sent through the system includes a small ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of the page, so if anyone no longer wants to hear from you, all it takes is one click. If an email address bounces, Campaign Monitor can remove it from the list automatically. You can add an automatic subscription form to your website for people to join the list. In short, Campaign Monitor will manage your subscribers for you – there’s no more time-consuming address book management.

What’s more, once your email is sent, you have access to statistics such as who opens the email, who clicks on the links to your website – information which is difficult trace when emails are sent manually.

On top of this, there are dozens of other features: newsletter designs can be tested to ensure that they will display properly in all the major email clients, and you can make separate lists for customers who may have slightly different interests within your service. If you wish, you can even track whether recipients of the email have forwarded it on to a friend.

Here are some examples of Campaign Monitor newsletters we have designed and sent for clients in the past:

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WordPress is a powerful, yet simple, blog management system which runs online. Installation and customization is simple, it can be skinned to look like almost anything and if you don’t have a design in mind there are hundreds of themes available. The license allows us to modify the templates as much as we like and does not even require we credit WordPress… oh and its completely free!

This allows us to use WordPress almost like a Content Management System with any custom arrangement of pages, categories, sub-categories and even our own custom static pages. In some cases we have stripped out what we don’t need and used it as a simple and effective feedback or latest news system.

But WordPress is just as useful ‘out of the box’ it contains everything you need to set up and manage a successful blog and can be a great asset to your website, giving it an up-to-date feeling, while increasing repeat visits and improving SEO. There are thousands of plug-ins available for WordPress which do a range of things from running automatic backups and basic security, to automatically updating your Twitter account and turning your blog into a photo gallery.

(more…)

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Recently we’ve had quite a surge in the number of clients who have come to us for SEO services.  One of the sites that underwent some SEO treatment in October was that belonging to Cloudfree IT, who are a team of IT consultants in Keighley, Shipley and Bingley in West Yorkshire.

This site was an interesting one to work on, as much of its existing navigation relies on Javascript. If a page is only linked to the rest of the site via a Javascript link, Google is unable to find it, and the page is not indexed. This meant that there were quite a few pages on the site which, even if they received heavy onsite SEO, would never appear in any Google search because Google simply couldn’t see them. Ideally we would recode the site, which is still a possibility for the future but since the budget to do this was not immediately available and SEO was seen as more of a priority, we needed a work-around.

Our solution was simple: we created a site map, and made sure that every page was linked from that via a static text link. Within a few weeks Google had not only indexed the pages for the first time, but they were also beginning to climb to higher positions for various searches such as ‘IT support in Shipley‘, ‘computer repairs in Bingley‘ and ‘Keighley computer services‘.

Another interesting point that arose when optimising this site was the fact that when a Google search is performed which contains ‘IT’, Google will often ignore this, as it sees it as the word ‘it’ which is disregarded by the search engine due to being a very commonly used word. Google does have an option at the bottom of pages of such results inviting the user to view results which do contain the word ‘it’, but this is hard to spot, especially when quickly flicking through different sites, and I imagine many users will miss it.

This means that it takes considerably more effort to obtain a high position for searches containing ‘IT’. When optimising a site for ‘Keighley IT consultants‘, if Google is only paying attention to the words ‘Keighley’ and ‘consultants’, many other consultants within various other professions in Keighley are unwittingly competitors for the Google top position. Despite this, after our SEO treatment Cloudfree IT has gained a number 1 position in Google for ‘IT consultants in Keighley‘ without having to click the ‘display results that contain the word “it”‘ button. It’s interesting to note, however, that position number 2 is currently occupied by a firm of recruitment consultants, position 3 by business consultants, and 4 by transport consultants – none of whom offer any IT services at all!

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