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Why it needed re-designed and re-developed

The old site

The original site was built using WordPress. WordPress is a fantastic framework but it was far too bloated for a project like this. 99% of the WordPress functionality wasn’t needed.

Maintenance and keeping the site updated was also an issue. For every website that was submitted I would have to do several tasks including taking screenshots, saving screenshots, uploading screenshots etc.

Lots to do there, hence the reason I had no time to update it.

The new site

Using Rails I was able to develop a minimal web app that only included the functionality that it actually needed – submitting and approving websites.

Using the very cool Bluga.net webthumb API, the web app is able to automatically take, resize and save screenshots of the websites.

Approving and publishing a site now literally takes one click.

Experimental for me

As with any side project I was able to experiment and learn a few new things.

For this project I was able to try out:

• Haml
• Sass
• Compass
• Simplificator rwebthumb gem

Am loving the combination of Sass and Compass for writing CSS. Will follow up with a more detailed post on this soon.

How useful are ‘CSS galleries’?

Galleries like this have to be taken with a pinch of salt. Of course they don’t represent all the great sites that are out there and they certainly don’t take into account user experience or what’s below the surface of the iceberg. It’s a visual snapshot of a bunch of websites that form a good first impression.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em I still think it’s interesting and useful to see who’s delivering quality websites locally.

Do you know any cracking Irish websites?

Submit them to WebDesignire. Even better if it’s not one of your own sites ;-)

Looking for clean, well structured websites with a good mix of type, colour, shape, texture and whitespace etc. HTML5 and CSS3 use is a bonus.

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.

• Similar posts plugin
• Popular posts plugin
• Share this plugin or sociable plugin

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

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.

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.

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.

Click here to get easyComment.

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

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 ;)

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.

However, I was having trouble accessing my MAMP server through Parallels. I use Parallels to test my sites on Internet Explorer and it’s pretty important that I’m able to do this in development before going live.

I found this excellent solution from Tim Fletcher and thought I’d summarize it below so you too can get testing your Wordpess, CodeIgniter, PHP sites etc. through Parallels.

1. Install Bonjour for Windows

Download and install (in your Windows OS) Apple’s Bonjour For Windows.

2. Enable file sharing

Now back in Mac OSX, enable file sharing. System Preferences > Sharing > File Sharing.

3. Change your computer name

From the ‘Sharing’ window you have open, change your computers name to localhost.local.

4. Change your Apache and MySQL ports in MAMP

Run MAMP and open up ‘Preferences’. Change the Apache Port to 80 and the MySQL Port to 3306

N.B. Make sure there are no other instances of MySQL running.

5. Configure your framework

Change the settings on your framework to reflect the new settings.

The example I’ve used here is WordPress. Change your WordPress address (& blog address) to http://localhost.local (Settings > General).

Volia!

You should now be able to access your site from your Parallels Windows environment using the URL http://localhost.local and you can test your site in IE.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

9. WP-Pagenavi

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

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.

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.

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

Further Reading

• WordPress plugin directory
• Yoast WordPress plugins
• Useful WordPress plugins