We would like to showcase two of our most recent websites that make good use of WordPress: Golden Bough, Intellectual Property Solutions and Precious Cargo, a sub site of The Laurence Sterne Trust.

Golden Bough

Golden Bough, Intellectual Poperty

This is a small brochure style website that required an easy to use and archived latest news system, with certain news items to appear on the home page, as well as a Chinese translated version of the site which was to be translated by the client themselves, i.e not an automatic translation.

To achieve the news management we made use of WordPress’ blog features, creating new posts for each news item. These are automatically archived and can easily be outputted by Month, Year or Date. We then fed all posts which have the tag ‘featured’ to the home page, including their featured image, with a default image for those without one. We then displayed these featured news items as a slideshow using Javascript with the jQuery Cycle plugin.

The archived news system

The featured news items display in a slideshow

For the Chinese version of the site we used a WordPress plugin called qTranslate. There are plenty of Translation plugins for WordPress although most of them provide an automatic translation of some sort, using various online services, qTranslate enables the client to write the translation themselves, as you can see in the screenshot below.

The edit panel with Chinese version of the content

The plugin also creates a user friendly URL for the Chinese version, simply adding the folder ‘/zh/’ to the URL, for example: http://www.goldenboughip.com/GBIP/zh/services/.

The only issue we had was that only the text contained within the WordPress database is translated. We also needed to load a different banner for the Chinese version, as well as other little bits of text such as the contact form labels. For this we used some custom php to detect which language was currently being viewed and then serve up the appropriate text snippet or set of banners.

Precious Cargo

The Precious Cargo Letters

Precious Cargo has been a huge task and we are all very pleased with the result. The one installation of WordPress actually manages 2 different sub sites of The Laurence Sterne Trust, Precious Cargo and The Collection.

The main focus of the Precious cargo sub site was to be the ‘Letters from Yorick to Eliza‘, which are scans from a book. Each scanned page is set up as a different page in WordPress (all sub pages of the same parent). Each of these pages has a featured image attached (the scanned image), as well as some content (the page notes). A number of the letters also have YouTube videos associated which are added via a custom field.

This all works well within the template we set up, however, what was required was a more sophisticated system of browsing the letters, without needing to load a new page each time and then scroll down to the letter. For this we created a custom Javascript slideshow which allows us to browse the letters without having to load a new page, this includes the page notes and a link to the embedded YouTube video (if one exists), the YouTube embed code is cleverly added to a popup window.

One of many informative pages on the Precious cargo exhibit

Alongside the letters we needed a number of pages, each with a gallery of images and extra ‘page notes’ at the bottom, the page notes being created with custom fields and the Custom Field Template plugin (which adds WYSIWYG editing to custom fields). One of these pages also needed to display certain events and exhibitions from the main Laurence Sterne Trust website. We had built a custom event management system for them last year so for this we added the ability to tag an event as ‘precious cargo’ we then fed all the precious cargo tagged events through to this page.

For two of the pages we also required a  ‘mini blog’, with one of them having comment functionality. As these only needed to be single category blogs we simply output the posts from the relevant category in each page’s template, along with the featured image and the usual social bookmarking links.

This left the ‘posts’ in WordPress relatively free and enabled us to use these for the second sub site, The Collection. This is a showcase of books and various other items, ‘The World’s largest collection of editions of the 18th century writer Laurence Sterne’s work.’

These are split into 9 categories just like the usual blog posts, the categories are all sub categories of a top level ‘the collection’ category. Each item has a featured image and a set of images displayed in a gallery format. We made use of custom fields to display extra information, such as object history, dimensions, date, author etc.

We also included the WordPress search function, limiting the results to the Collection categories only, rather than the entire WordPress databse which would give us precious cargo pages aswell.

The Collection home page

An item in The Collection

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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.

Lock Pages
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lock-pages/
Thanks to Mark for finding this one, “Lock Pages prevents specified pages (or all pages) from having their slug or parent edited, or from being deleted, by non-administrators.” Really handy when using WordPress as a CMS, as we all know what could happen if top level pages start being removed and renamed.

Excerpt and Content Word Limit
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/content-and-excerpt-word-limit/
You can’t always rely on a client making use of either the ‘excerpt’ or the ‘more tag’ and as useful as the excerpt is, it relys on it being set up in the theme. I had played around with word limit plugins before but been unsatisfied, mostly due to the limits of the options. This plugin is great, you can use it anywhere you like, by swapping the usual ‘the_content()’ to ‘content(25)’ in your theme, where 25 is the number of words to limit the post by, this is handy because you can have different word limits in different places and can also limit the excerpt. The only downside of this plugin is that the word limit, is itself limited by 27, i.e. it wont go any higher than that.

Maintenance Mode
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/maintenance-mode/
“Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end.” Says it all really, very useful as without messing with the .htaccess file you can’t just add an index.html page to appear before the .php, and even then i’m not sure that will work. You can of course edit the standard template that comes with the plugin, it is also easy to switch on and off and includes other settings I haven’t needed to play with.

WP-Paginate
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-paginate/
Pagination is a great way to navigate lots of pages of a ‘list’ kind of style, i.e. blog posts. WordPress page navigation out of the box is, in my opinion, a bit naff, simply going from previous to next page. This is easy to install and easy to style. Use this and the breadcrumb nav and you’re sorted.

Thats 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.

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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 makes WordPress a great, highly fexible content management system, take a look at our post on using WordPress as a content management system here.

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:

Button Bag
Blog for Button Bag, Craft Kits for Children e-commerce website, this was added to their current website with a slightly modified design, makes use of plugins WP-print and Sexy Bookmarks, as well as Breadcrumb trail and All in one SEO pack.

Get Cycling News
Wordpress was added to the Get Cycling website to handle their latest news. It is a simple, single category blog which feeds the latest 4 posts onto the home page.

Cyclorama
Get Cycling sister company, Cyclorama wanted a blog to run alongside their current website, the blog was designed to look like the rest of the site and has been made good use of, with plenty of articles, links to other blogs, a feed from their Twitter account and ‘share this’ social bookmarking links.

Web Analytics Consultancy
Facts and Figures is a feature rich blog, making good use of Twitter Syndication, RSS feeds by Feedburner, email subscription to feeds and comments, share this social bookmarking, print this post, all in one SEO pack and vipers video quick-tags. The theme was chosen by the client from the WordPress theme directory and modified to meet the blogs requirements.

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 and WP-Syntax.

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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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Lets begin with Facebook, you can do this on either your personal profile, or a Facebook ‘page’, you cannot currently do this on Groups. Go to your profile or page and look for ‘notes’ on the tabs at the top, if you can’t see notes you can add it by clicking the add button. Go into notes then look to the bottom left for a link titled ‘edit import settings’ click on this, then input your blogs RSS feed url and bobs yer uncle, each new post now appears on your wall! You can take a look at it in action here.

Import your blogs RSS feed into your Facebook Notes

Next, Twitter, for this we use a plugin called Twitter Tools. This enables you to automatically ‘tweet’ everytime you create a new blog post, you can also disable this for individual posts and it works the other way round too, i.e. everytime you tweet, a new blog post is created. It also gives you the option to update Twitter only, direct from WordPress. After following the plugins installation we then have to create an ‘application’ in Twitter.

Login to Twitter, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on ‘Twitter API’ click on register an app and fill in the required information. For application type, choose Browser, for default access type, choose read and write and use your blogs address for the callback url. Once you have submitted this information you will be given a Consumer Key, Consumer Secret, Access Token and Access Token Secret. Copy these details into Twitter tools and you are good to go.

You need to create a Twitter application, in order to get Twitter Tools working

Finally, LinkedIn. For this there are 2 methods, the first one simply displays a list of your latest posts on your profile, for this you simply need to add the WordPress application to your LinkedIn account and then input your blog details, you can do so here. That is all well and good, the only issue is that people need to be viewing your profile in order to see your latest posts. The second method, makes use of your Twitter account, login to LinkedIn and go to your update status box, click on the blue Twitter logo and you will see your Twitter settings, you can now add your Twitter account, follow the instructions and your ready to go.

Access your Twitter account settings and also send your status updates to Twitter

This is how we have set up Web Dev Blog, we always use WordPress to post and everything else follows. However, if you set Twitter Tools to create a new blog post from tweets you can then do everything from either Twitter or LinkedIn (take a look at the diagram below). Also please note that with regards to Twitter and LinkedIn, there are settings to control how the updates display, wether to use tinyURLs etc.

There are 3 ways to update all 4 websites

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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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