Lee Munroe » Wordpress http://www.leemunroe.com User Experience and Web Interface Designer Lee Munroe Thu, 09 Feb 2012 02:44:16 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 Barcamp Belfast: The 7 Deadly Sins of WordPresshttp://www.leemunroe.com/barcamp-belfast-7-deadly-sins-wordpress/ http://www.leemunroe.com/barcamp-belfast-7-deadly-sins-wordpress/#comments Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:45:41 +0000 Lee http://www.leemunroe.com/?p=1282

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Your browser sent an invalid request. ]]> I had the pleasure of attending and talking at Barcamp Belfast on Saturday (25th April) before dashing off and getting a plane to London for the marathon.

I had a great morning and going by feedback from others the whole day was a great success with some fantastic speakers and over 350 attendees. Well done to Andy Good for putting it together, along with all those who helped out. There’s a good video montage of the day here.

The 7 Deadly Sins of WordPress

I got the ball rolling at 9.30am with my WordPress talk, looking at 7 ways to make your (WordPress) blog more effective.

I thought that rather than put up my slides (which don’t really make sense out of context) I’d give an overview of the 7 points and the solutions.

1. Backup

Assume things will go wrong and the time will come when you’ll regret you didn’t backup (server problems, site gets hacked, client/other user deletes stuff, you muck it up yourself)

Solution

Backup daily automatically with WP-DB-Plugin. Your backup will be emailed to you daily and you don’t have to lift a finger.

2. Easy Comments

Make it as easy as possible for users to leave comments. Don’t put a barrier in their way in the form of captchas or having to signup to leave a comment. These are used to stop spam, but there are better user friendly ways.

Solution

To stop spam, install and activate Akismet (which will put spam in a spam folder) and verify comments before they’re published.

3. URLS

The default URL for posts e.g. http://www.leemunroe.com/?p=1194 doesn’t mean anything to users or search engines.

http://www.leemunroe.com/tips-more-twitter-followers/ means more to users (they now know what content is on that page) and search engines can allocate keywords to that page based on the url

Solution

Under Settings > Permalinks click ‘Custom structure’ and enter /%postname%/. This will change your URL so it includes the article title.

4. Feed

Make sure your RSS feed link is easy to find. It should be clearly linked to in your sidebar and should be in the browsers address bar also (this is a common convention and there are also applications that will find your feed going by the link in your head).

By default WordPress will include this link, as will most themes, but if you’re designing your own theme it can often be overlooked.

Solution

Put this code between your <head> tags:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=“Title” href=”link-to-feed” />

5. Actions

Once someone reads through your post it’s up to you to point them in the right direction of what their next actions should be. They could add a comment, read other articles on your site, help promote the post, follow you on Twitter etc.

Solution

Use the following plugins to suggest actions at the end of your post. These will help keep users on your site reading other articles or help to promote your post via social networking sites.

6. SEO

For your posts to be found on Google they have to be well optimized. There are a few simple modifications you can make to help SEO.

Solution

Use the All In One SEO Pack and you can set titles, descriptions and keywords for your homepage, posts and pages.

7. Text

On the web, people don’t read they scan. You have roughly 3 seconds to grab the readers attention so your text should be easily read and scannable.

Solution
  • Break blocks of text into smaller paragraphs
  • Use meaningful sub headings
  • Use lists where appropriate (bullet and numbered)
  • Highlight (bold) keywords
  • Make sure links stand out against other text
  • Remove unnecessary waffle text
B-E-L-F-A-S-T

Photo thanks to Colin Parte

These are my 7 deadly sins of WordPress. It should take you no longer than an hour to implement these solutions and they will make a big difference to the effectiveness of your blog.

There are lots of other ways you can improve the effectiveness of your blog so feel free to share any tips below.

Also if anyone has any links to #barcampbelfast roundups or photos, please share.

]]> http://www.leemunroe.com/barcamp-belfast-7-deadly-sins-wordpress/feed/ 11 Guest Post: 10 Things To Do After Installing WordPresshttp://www.leemunroe.com/guest-post-10-things-to-do-after-installing-wordpress/ http://www.leemunroe.com/guest-post-10-things-to-do-after-installing-wordpress/#comments Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:03:06 +0000 Lee http://www.leemunroe.com/?p=855 I started the year looking to write a few guest posts for other blogs and not just my own so I approached Michael from Pro Blog Design with an idea for a post.

The post takes a look at what you should do after installing WordPress and acts as a checklist that you can use to ensure you’ve changed and activated all that you should do for each of your WordPress sites. I came up with the checklist initially for myself but thought it would be useful to share, especially for beginners.

Pro Blog Design focuses on blog and WordPress posts, and has a good established following so it was the perfect choice of site for this post.

Read the full post here.

Let me know you think and if there’s anything else you’d like covered.

]]> http://www.leemunroe.com/guest-post-10-things-to-do-after-installing-wordpress/feed/ 7 Quicktip: Auto-Complete Blog Comment Fieldshttp://www.leemunroe.com/auto-complete-blog-comment-fields/ http://www.leemunroe.com/auto-complete-blog-comment-fields/#comments Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:02:58 +0000 Lee http://www.leemunroe.com/?p=845 You like to comment on blog posts but you’re sick of having to enter the usual name, mail and website fields (even with autofill it still requires effort).

If you’re using Firefox there’s a handy solution. EasyComment is a plugin that stores this default information for you. Then, when you’re on a blog post and you want to leave a comment, click the easyComment button and it will fill in all the fields. You can even enter a default message like ‘Nice post, thanks’ if that’s all you want to say.

Picture 36.png

Click here to get easyComment.

The easyComment button is located at the bottom of your browser window.

easy.jpg

Without easyComment, it takes approximately 10 seconds to fill in your name, email and url. Assuming you leave 1 comment per day, that’s 70 seconds per week or 310 seconds per month or 3,650 seconds per year you’ll save. That’s an extra hour you could be playing Halo or World of Warcraft ;)

]]> http://www.leemunroe.com/auto-complete-blog-comment-fields/feed/ 21 Quicktip: Update your WordPress copyright date automaticallyhttp://www.leemunroe.com/quicktip-update-your-wordpress-copyright-date-automatically/ http://www.leemunroe.com/quicktip-update-your-wordpress-copyright-date-automatically/#comments Thu, 08 Jan 2009 13:04:50 +0000 Lee http://www.leemunroe.com/?p=832 New year, time to go through all your websites and blogs and update the copyright date that you placed in the footer, right?

Not if you were smart and developed your site so it updates automatically.

Solution

PHP and WordPress can update your copyright year automatically.

Just place this code where you want the year to appear and voila, your year will change to 2009 (and will update automatically for years to come).

<?php echo date('Y'); ?>

Admittedly I hadn’t done this myself until today ;)

Don’t use the_time

I seen a couple of solutions using the_time tag in WordPress, but this only displays the year of the last blog post in the_loop.

]]> http://www.leemunroe.com/quicktip-update-your-wordpress-copyright-date-automatically/feed/ 8 10 plugins you should be using in your WordPress theme or bloghttp://www.leemunroe.com/10-plugins-for-your-wordpress-theme-blog/ http://www.leemunroe.com/10-plugins-for-your-wordpress-theme-blog/#comments Mon, 13 Oct 2008 02:39:25 +0000 Lee http://www.leemunroe.com/?p=1335 Nearly everything you’ll need to do on WordPress someone’s been there and done it first. One of the great things about WordPress is that there’s so many plugins available and they’re so easy to install on your theme.

Here’s 10 (+bonus) plugins that I used on my WordPress theme that should aid both you and your readers.

1. Popular posts

Over time your most popular and useful posts will slowly fade away into your archives. Use this handy plugin so you can showoff your top posts to new readers in your sidebar.

Popular posts

2. Redirection

Highly recommended. Takes a log of any 404 (page not found) errors on your site and then you can add 302 redirects for these errors, ensuring that future users don’t come across the same errors and search engine bots are directed towards the correct url. Particularly useful if you change the structure of your site and all your old incoming links break.

Edit: It lets you add 301 redirects (i.e. permanent redirects) rather than 302 redirects

Redirection

3. Sideblog

I introduced a sideblog into my site so I could refresh my content daily without the need for having to write long articles. It’s good to share other sites you come across.

Sideblog

4. Similar

If a user enjoys reading one of your articles, chances are they’ll enjoy your related articles. Keep them reading on your site as long as possible by recommending similar posts.

Similar posts

5. Code Auto Escape

This handy plugin is for writing articles or tutorials that include code snippets. Everything you write between the code tags will be escaped, so you can just copy and paste the code from your editor.

Code auto escape

6. Gravatars 2

Add a face and some personalisation to your user comments by adding Gravatars. Users can associate gravatars with their email address by uploading a photo on gravatar.com.

Gravatars

7. Sociable

Sociable adds the tiny icons to the end of your post that allows your users to share and promote your article via external networking sites. It is fully customisable so you can decide what icons you want listed.

Sociable

8. Subscribe to comments

This is a good way to get conversations going on your blog. Allowing a user to subscribe to comments means that every time someone comments, they get notified, which can potentially get you another comment from them.

Subscribe to comments

9. WP-Pagenavi

The default pagination with WordPress isn’t great so dicky it up a bit with this sweet plugin.

Pagination

10. Akismet

Stops *most* of the spam that comes through as comments on your blog.

You will need an API key to activate Akismet on your blog. To get this, signup to WordPress.com and your API key should be emailed to you. Alternatively, login to WordPress.com and select ‘Edit Profile’ from ‘My Account’. Your API key should be displayed on this page.

Akismet

Bonus: Amazon Showcase

Sign up for an associates account on Amazon then for every book you refer to someone, you will get a percentage of the sale in your pocket. This showcase plugin allows you to easily show your favorite books and links them through to Amazon with your referral ID.

Picture 24.png

Go one step further and setup an aStore so you can show your users all the books you recommend.

Further Reading

]]> http://www.leemunroe.com/10-plugins-for-your-wordpress-theme-blog/feed/ 5 Tips and hacks for creating your own WordPress themehttp://www.leemunroe.com/tips-and-hacks-for-creating-your-own-wordpress-theme/ http://www.leemunroe.com/tips-and-hacks-for-creating-your-own-wordpress-theme/#comments Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:58:16 +0000 Lee http://www.leemunroe.com/?p=221 WordPress is a great blogging engine. It’s easy to get it up and running and there’s a lot of free themes available. But if you want to be a bit more creative and design your own theme or even use WordPress as a CMS (content management system), this can be easily done. The recent redesign of my website has used WordPress as a CMS. I’ve noted several useful tips and hacks that I came across while designing my theme that may come in useful.

Before using the snippets below you might want to start with the basics of designing your own theme. Check out these useful websites for step by step guides on designing your own themes and templates.

Referencing images in your theme

Referencing images in your stylesheet (style.css) are relative.

background:url(images/myimage.gif)

Referencing images in your html templates are absolute so use the template directory tag.

<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/myimage.gif" alt="" />

Full size images

WordPress 2.6 resizes your images to 500px width, even when you tick the full width option, so there’s a hack to get around this. Go to /wp-includes/media.php on line 84 and comment that line (//)

// any other type: use the real image and constrain it
// list( $width, $height ) = image_constrain_size_for_editor( $meta['width'], $meta['height'], $size );

This way instead of <img class="..." src="..." alt="" width="..." height="..." /> you will get <img class="..." src="..." alt="" />
Thanks to parisoto for this hack.

Exclude specific categories

If you want to exclude or only include specific categories, e.g. you only want your portfolio page to include posts with the portfolio category, use query posts before your loop.

<?php query_posts('cat=-2'); ?>

This would remove the category with ID 2 from the list. You can get your category IDs by hovering or clicking on them in your admin area. I noticed this can cause a pagination problem though, so if you’re paginating use the code below.

<?php
$paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
query_posts($query_string . "&cat=-2&paged=$paged");
?>

Unique category templates

Just name your template file category-ID.php and this will be a specific template for that category e.g. category-2.php

Unique category single page

In your single.php template do a check to see which category your post is in, then redirect it to another template for that category.

<?php
	if ( in_category('2') ) {
  include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/single-2.php');
	}else{
	include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/single-all.php');
	}
?>

Nice page titles

Put the name of the current page followed by a hyphen.

<?php wp_title(' - ',true,'right');?>Freelance Web Design

This would return something like “Portfolio – Freelance Web Design”

Fancy tags

Set up your tags list.

<?php the_tags('<ul class="tags clearfix"><li>', '</li><li>', '</li></ul>'); ?>

This produces similar to the following HTML.

<ul class="tags">
	<li><a rel="tag" href="http://www.leemunroe.com/tags/cms/">CMS</a></li>
</ul>

Then apply some CSS to style them as you like.

ul.tags{
list-style: none;
margin:0;
}

ul.tags li{
display: inline;
}

ul.tags li{
display:block;
float:left;
padding-left:12px;
background:url(images/tag.gif) left no-repeat;
margin:0 5px 5px 0;
}

ul.tags li a{
display:block;
float:left;
height:22px;
padding:3px 12px 0 0;
background:url(images/tag.gif) right no-repeat;
}

Customise read more

Customise the “Read more” link that separates your post. In your index.php where it says:

<?php the_content(); ?>

Put the text that you want your link to say between the brackets.

<?php the_content('Read this article'); ?>

The more link has a class of ‘more-link’ so apply some CSS to style it.

.more-link{
padding:10px;
background:#3c3028;
font-weight: bold;
float: right;
}

Highlight author’s comments

Add an .authcomment style.

.authcomment{
background:#fff;
}

comments.php has a line like this:

<li class=”<?php echo $oddcomment; ?>” id=”comment…

Change it to this:

<li class=”<?php
/* Only use the authcomment class from style.css if the user_id is 1 (admin) */
if (1 == $comment->user_id)
$oddcomment = “authcomment”;
echo $oddcomment;
?>” id=”comment…


Thanks to Matt Cutts for this hack.

Archive dropdown box

After a year or more of blogging your archive list can get pretty long so shorten it down with a dropdown box.

<select name="archive-dropdown" onchange='document.location.href=this.options[this.selectedIndex].value;'>
<option value=""><?php echo attribute_escape(__('Select Month')); ?></option>
<?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly&format=option&show_post_count=0'); ?> </select>

Further reading

Hopefully there’s a few useful tips in there that will save you having to figure them out for yourself. I recommend checking out the links below for further WordPress theme tips.

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