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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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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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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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.

Some examples:

Breaks night in York
Blog to promote a monthly DJ night, a simple yet funky design complete with Soundcloud snippets, Flickr Gallery Feeds and Twitter Syndication.

Thrifty Living website
Highly customized blog with different templates for each category, although no plug-ins have been used a large amount of custom coding was required, the blog sits alongside static pages including an online book shop.

Tui Na UK
A simple, cheap feedback system was required that would let users post feedback on particular pages, WordPress was chosen to do the job and integrated on a number of pages, all other ‘blog like’ features have been taken out of the front end so all we see is the feedback form and the comments. A gallery was then required, so we installed a gallery plug-in and again, stripped out all but the standard blog stuff.

Web Analytics Consultancy
Features: Twitter Syndication, RSS feeds by Feedburner, email subscription to feeds and comments, social bookmark links, print this post, all in one SEO and vipers video quick-tags.

This one!
You may have noticed you are reading a WordPress blog, this one is fairly ‘out of the box’ but uses the following plug ins: all in one SEO pack, Add lightbox, Google Analytics for WordPress, Lightbox 2, Limit login attempts, WP-Syntax and WPBook.

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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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In the past we’ve had several clients say:

“That text would look much neater justified, can you change it please?”

In most cases we’ve successfully explained the pitfalls of justified text and the client has agreed to keep the standard left alignment. However, in some cases, clients had decided to have justified text regardless.

What is justified text and when is it used?

Justified text or justification, in typography, is the alignment of text within a column or measure to align against the left and right margin. To achieve this effect, extra space is added between words. Justified text is commonly used in printed media such as newspapers, book, leaflets etc where the straight line on each margin can be used successfully to guide the eye across columns of text.

Newspapers are a great example of  justified text used successfully. With such a large amount of information to place on a large area, the neatly aligned columns clearly define the different areas of text and create a logical flow of words, thus enhancing readability.

Why is justified text on websites a bad idea?

There are many reasons why not to use justified text and they revolve around usability and user experience.

The human eye perceives images on a screen different to that of printed media so its understandable that justified text can work, but not necessarily on a computer screen. You may not be aware but the image on a screen is not static, in fact its updated and refreshed many times a second. Reading on a computer screen is much harder on the eyes than reading from printed media.

Here are the top reasons why justified text is a bad idea for websites

• When using justified text for print, the designer has complete control over how the user will see the content. However, with the many combination of website browsers (and versions) on many different operating systems, a website designer can not be certain how the justified text will be rendered on the screen. For example a person using Firefox 3 browser on a Mac, would likely see the text displayed differently to somebody using Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP.
• The different rendering on different systems can create “rivers” of white space. This is when the spaces between words line up with other lines of text, creating a column of space down the content. This river within the text draws the eye away from the content making it more difficult to read. In some cases the white space can form more of a logical pattern than the content itself.
• A combination of the first two points make justified text difficult to read by dyslexic users. The uneven white space creates a distraction which can easily make you loose your place. As web designers we spend time testing in different browsers to make sure as many people as possible can view the website as intended. Around 10% of the UK population are affected by dyslexia to some degree, so making a website that is difficult for 10% of users to read is obviously a bad idea!
• Visually impaired users often use screen magnifiers to enlarge text to a suitable level. Many magnifiers work by enlarging the area around your mouse. Because the large uneven spaces are also magnified it can become difficult for the to follow the words with their magnifying software. Instead of following the flow of words along even spacing, users have to find the start of each new word.
• The Royal National Institute of Blind people (RNIB) strongly recommend websites do not use justified text. Modern websites are all about the user. There was a time websites were created to look good on the creators screen, not necessarily other users. Websites we not tested thoroughly to make sure all users can access the content. Times have changed and accessibility and usability are very important factors in modern website development. Doing anything that excludes or hinders certain users, reduces the audience and therefore the overall success of a website.

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The grandiose term for these are Geographical Information Systems – GIS. And they are incredibly useful. You can find out whether your house will be underwater come the next flash flood, you can find your political representatives, or you can find your nearest bakery.

So – if you’ve got an interest in the real world, you’ll need to get your flag raised on the virtual one too. You’ll want to be listed on Google Local Business - currently rivalling the Yellow Pages as the source for information on local services. Like anything with user-created content, it can be messy. Some unscrupulous types will go to any length to hog the top spots (can you spot the spam listings here?). But list yourself, and they will come.

But there’s so much more you can do with maps, courtesy of Google -

Get a map on your website
It’s really straightforward to embed a Google map on your website showing your location. We offer that as standard to all our clients – check out this site selling ethical jewellery for an example. It lets people zoom and pan around to get the context they need, depending on how well they know your area. You don’t get that with a static image.

People love playing with maps. Men especially. If you’ve got some excuse for getting a map on your site, you should. For some businesses, like these letting agents in York, it’s obvious why you’d want one. But any excuse is a good one. We’ve recently finished setting up a site for a Yorkshire wine merchant, and we’re going to be adding to this over the new few months. One thing you’ll see on the site soon is a map showing where the vinyards are that grew the wine they sell. Select ‘Satellite Map’ and see the actual rows of vines. Doesn’t that make the wine seem more special? I know I’ll be checking to see if they’ve got any wines from the vinyards I cycled through on holiday.

I’ll blog later on some of the problems we encounter when we’re using these systems and some of the ways we get around these them.

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