Planning Your Website Effectively- WordPress Is A Tool Not A Strategy

Planning your website effectively- WordPress is a tool not a strategy

One of the reasons why WordPress is so awesome is because it makes building powerful websites pretty easy. Pick a theme, add some content, hit Publish and there you have it. Lack of technical know-how is no longer a barrier, and the array of shiny, sexy themes that are available along with the inexpensivenss of it all can make it dangerously easy to under-think the process of building a website. But while WordPress and its eco-system have made many parts of the process simple and taken the grunt work out of making a site, the one thing that YOU still have to do, is the analytical thinking and planning behind your site.

For your site to be an effective business tool, it must reflect the core goals and missions of your company. Whereas many of us start the planning of a site by looking at the available WordPress themes and letting those designs sway our decisions, we really need to be starting from a more strategic point of view and making decisions about themes, plugins etc, based on the bigger picture.

So before you put pixel to screen, or start buying themes, consider the following.

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6 Common WordPress “Gotchas” To Avoid

6 common WordPress Problems to avoid

I teach people on a daily basis how to use WordPress, from the ground up. A few face-smackingly simple issues come up time and again.

1) Pasting from Word will make your posts look funky

Anytime you copy and paste directly into the WordPress editor, from Microsoft Word, another website, or any other outside source, you run the risk of it looking, well,  a bit funky ,when you publish it. This is because other applications, especially Word, have their own set of formatting that gets carried over when you copy/paste. Usually this ends up conflicting with the formatting and styling of your theme. You may not realize there is an issue until you publish the post and something looks off – the fonts don’t quite match, or the spacing is strange. 9 times out of 10 in these cases, it’s because you copied/pasted from Word. To avoid such issues, simply use the 2 clipboard buttons on the second line of the post editing toolbar with the T and the W on them.

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Creating Password Protected Pages and Areas in WordPress

Creating Private, Password Protected Sections on Your WordPress Site

I had a client recently who needed to create private, password-protected sections on her WordPress site. She wanted each of her clients to have a private page with information related to what they were working on together. Easy! Password-protection is an in-built feature of WordPress, in case you didn’t know.

When creating a page, you simply click “Edit” next to Visibility in the Publish box on the right. Choose “Password protected” and set the password as you choose.

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WordPress Widget To Display A Twitter Hashtag

Need a Twitter plugin that does a little more than simply display your own Tweets in the sidebar? Tweet Blender does a ton of stuff:

Tweet Blender is tag-aware and has support for multiple authors, lists, hashtags, and keywords all blended together. The plugin can show tweets from just one user or a list of users (as all other Twitter plugins do); however, it can also show tweets for a topic which you can define via Twitter hashtag or keyword. But there is more! It can also show tweets for multiple authors AND multiple lists AND multiple keywords AND multiple hashtags all blended together into a single stream.

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WordPress Security Alert – TimThumb Image Resizing Script

WordPress Security Issue wIth Timthumb

In recent days a significant WordPress security threat has emerged. The root of it is the ability for unsavory types to compromise a very common image resizing script called TimThumb which is used in many WordPress themes and plugins. Through a security flaw, hackers can find a way into your site and cause havoc. Or, in more specific terms according to Vaultpress:

“The vulnerability allows third parties to upload and execute arbitrary PHP code in the TimThumb cache directory. Once the PHP code has been uploaded and executed, your site can be compromised however the attacker likes.”

Are you at risk?

The list of themes and plugins that use this script is too long for any one source to have catalog-ed as yet. Securi has a partial list here. In my own researching I’ve found several major theme vendors to be vulnerable (WooThemes, Themify.me, Headway) although they have acted quickly to update their themes.  WebSite defender has a list of plugins and themes they know to be using timthumb.

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WordCamp San Diego Wrap-Up – Community Rocks!

wordcamp san diego

This past weekend I had the pleasure of speaking at the first ever WordCamp in San Diego. It was an amazing experience for many reasons. I delivered a presentation entitled “Treat Your Blog Like A Business: Which Monetization Strategy Is Right For You?” (I’ll get around to posting up the slides soon….) and received some encouraging feedback on it throughout the day. Being a total intovert , any kind of public speaking is a bit nerve-wracking but I like to challenge myself. A couple of years ago I spoke at Orange County WordCamp and in comparison I felt much better prepared and more comfortable with it this time. Thanks to all that watched and spoke with me afterwards!

As I have experienced with other WordCamps, WordPress has the best community I think I’ve ever been a part of. I didn’t know anyone when I went to San Diego this weekend, but by the end of the day I had connected with several incredible people and felt right at home. This is another huge reason why WordPress is so powerful. I’m not sure that any other technologies or industries have this kind of community aspect. If you have any interest in WordPress I highly recommend attending WordCamps – you’ll meet knowledgeable and friendly people who all want to help you and spread the WordPress love! You’ll also learn tons from the talks and get an even larger picture of the scope of WordPress and the many diverse ways in which it can be used.

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