Tag: wordpress

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Why wordpress? Why not squarespace or wix?

WordPress is extensible. What does that really mean? WordPress can grow well with a growing company and is a good base for that. There are a lot of plugins available for wordpress that add capabilities with nuances that go beyond that make it more customizable than Squarespace or Wix or Weebly or Websitebuilder.com.

These are also each hosted solutions so it can’t be used with the hosting through Fascination Design.

Also if you hire someone who solely works with Squarespace or Wix they may not know how to code and have a world view more limited to those platforms. I’m not a fan of Wix but Squarespace isn’t bad. If you want to DIY because you have more time than money then it would be a good choice.

Fascination Design does not build sites using squarespace etc. because it doesn’t give us the level of control and customization capabilities that we’re used to. I also do NOT offer support for the site options mentioned above so if you get started there and run into a problem, you must work with their customer support.

So it’s your choice, long term scalability or DIY.

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Can you find us a WordPress Theme / Template to customize?

I realized that I’ve been putting off pulling together a website quote for someone because they asked me to “find them a WordPress template to buy.” Shopping for a template someone else created and dealing with it’s quirks and problem coding is not how I work.

With every template there’s the potential that someone did some coding poorly or in a way that will have a negative impact on the implementation of plugins. Choosing a poorly coded theme can cost more in both time, limitations and headaches and it’s hard to know what you’re dealing with before you buy and get involved with a theme.

Creating a child theme from the current WordPress theme (twentytwelve or now twentythirteen at the time I’m writing this) and heavily customized css is my typical workflow these days. There are also a few select others like the Genesis framework that have been heavily vetted by the WordPress community that we will work with.

No – your site does not need to look like these themes, that’s why we customize them heavily using child themes.

Why is this a better way of working?

  • These themes just give us a leg up to speed up the creation process so that we’re not starting completely from scratch.
  • These are themes that are built by, specifically for, and included with each WordPress release and have the core functionalities needed to utilize most of WordPress’s  power without having to start from scratch.
  • These themes are less likely to cause problems with well built plugins or have strange quirks that are hard to fix.

See our process for more information.

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Your location privacy and photos from smartphones

I’m seeing a video go around about your photos from smartphones posing a privacy risk.  This video was published back in 2010 and many of the social networks have since started removing this location data from photos as they are uploaded because of this privacy concern. HOWEVER….

HOWEVER what I DO want to point out is that this might not be the case if you are uploading photos to your business websites and other places on the web.

Before any of my clients panic – I do have you covered (no need to change your phone settings) because there are ways to remove this data when being uploaded to a website as well.

This isn’t as big a deal if your business address is published and you’re taking photos at that location, but what if, for example, you are an artist taking photos of your art in your home studio? Or maybe you even simply took some products home to photograph?

For WordPress there are several plugins but my favorite is Smushit because it ALSO reduces file size and increases performance: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/

Related Testing Tools: For anyone interested in checking to see if their website photos are showing their location, the data talked about in this video is called “Exif data” and there are browser plugins that allow you to check to see what information is showing on your photos.

To make sure the tool you are using shows Geo Location Exif data, here’s a photo you can test with: http://www.summitpost.org/test-this-image-contains-exif-data/769474

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How do I rebuild a site in WordPress on the server while leaving the existing site live until it’s done?

These instructions are for designers and developers working on a linux based server.

1) Leave the existing site

2) put all of wordpress in a folder (usually “wordpress”)

3) build the site in wordpress and test it thoroughly.

4) put an htaccess file in the folder outside of the “wordpress” folder that redirects everything correctly to inside the wordpress folder as if it were in the public_html folder. Also, do your 301 redirects here for pages that need to redirect to specific wordpress pages or categories. Should look something like this:

RewriteEngine On

# Old redirects made Dec 6 2012
RewriteRule ^about_us.html /about-us/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^services.html /services-pricing/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^index.html / [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/wordpress/(.*)$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /wordpress/$1 [L]

 

7) Log in to wordpress, got to settings> general > and change WordPress Address (URL) and Site Site Address (URL) to not include the /wordpress/

Screen Shot 2013-01-15 at 3.14.50 PM

 

8) delete old site files that are outside of the wordpress folder just in case.

And you should be done. htacess files can sometimes be a little persnickety but the above directions and code should cover most basic situations.

If you’re on a Windows server you have to install something on the server and there may be some differences in the rewrite rules. I don’t work on Windows servers enough to give full details.

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The site that never was – maybe

We all occasionally end up with those tasks or projects that start out strong and then sorta fade into “I’ll get to it soon.” This entire site however ended up meeting that fate. When it came time to get the content together, the client was busy with his clients. Reminders were sent until they tapered off until they were no more. So the site just sat there about half done waiting for content.

I talked to the client recently and we decided to wrap up the files so he could use it at some point down the road but not to finish it out at this point in time.

It was a gorgeous site however and I wanted to just give a nice little peek of it here. It would be a shame if it never saw the light of day.

Hotfut Screen Shot 2013-01-04 at 12.58.14 PM

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Remove “Home” label only on homepage of WordPress theme

This is code to remove the “Home” label at the top of the page (typically just below the navigation menu) only on the homepage but leaving the page names on all of the other pages.

Find the file in your theme that calls the entry header. For the Twenty-Twelve theme, this will be in your content-page.php. (I also recommend creating a child theme instead of editing the existing Twenty-Twelve theme but we’ll save that for another time and focus on the code snippet for now.)

Replace:

<header class="entry-header">
	<h1 class="entry-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
</header>

 

With:

<!--conditional use header - no home on homepage-->
	<?php if( ! is_front_page() ) :?>
		<header class="entry-header">
			<h1 class="entry-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
		</header>
	<?php endif; ?>
<!--conditional use header - no home on homepage-->

 

 

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We’re looking for a WordPress (WP) pro to do a little contract labor for us now and then, tweaking here and there etc., is that the kinda work you do?

I DO actually do contract work and updates. I would like to know a bit more about the types of updates/tweaks you’re looking for and some additional information about the servers before I would commit to it, but the generic answer is yes.

If you want someone to come in to your office and work certain hours, that answer is no.

See also:

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Why you shouldn’t use Godaddy Hosting

Just Say No to Godaddy Hosting

Just Say No to Godaddy HostingGodaddy Shared Hosting is possibly one of the worst hosting solutions available to you. I would highly recommend avoiding them for anything other than domain name registration.

Here’s why Godaddy’s hosting is horrendous:

Slows down websites: Sites that would normally be fast on other hosting may take longer to load. Why? Because your site is packed onto a server like a sardine (this is not quite accurate but gives you a nice visual.) Godaddy likes to overwork servers. Overworked servers mean that they are really putting more than an ideal number of accounts on one machine. An example I came up with while researching my article was 3900 websites for one IP address. And your sites speed can be affected by how many people are trying to access the other sites. They say that if you don’t like possible periods of slowness, you should upgrade to their VPD accounts. More on this in a minute.

Very limited simultaneous connections to your site or database: In the case of database driven sites there may be multiple simultaneous connections to the database for one visitor. The exact number is dependent on your site. If it’s WordPress, things like plugins or themes may utilize connections to the database. Too many connections will cause a “Connection timed out” response. And even if you have a basic website without a database, what if you go to a networking event or trade show and 50 or more people try to access your site at once? They might not be able to because of the lower setting on your account.

 

Lax (or complete lack of) WordPress security: This is a lengthy article but pretty much explains this perfectly.

 

Godaddy’s VPD (Virtual Private Dedicated) hosting is no better. A client of mine had been talked into a Godaddy VPD account by a reseller who was someone he knew. The Godaddy VPD hosting account couldn’t run his website because of a bloated control panel, it kept dropping offline. “Simple Control Panel” (otherwise known as TomCat on the server end) uses up most  of the memory available to the lowest level VPD plan. If you call godaddy up, they automatically suggest upgrading to the next VPD plan (see a trend here? Their solutions seem to be “Got a problem? Upgrade to a bigger plan with us.”) So if you’re smart you switch hosts. If you’re smart and stubborn and really want to stick with godaddy,  you find this:

And turn the control panel off so you have access to the expected amount of memory and you don’t have to upgrade. Then to add insult to injury, the root access you had to make these changes magically disappears. No root, no command line, no control panel, you’re pretty much up a creek with less than you get with shared hosting. And the site goes down from time to time for 15 minutes here and there.

Yay! Note the sarcasm. Yes this really happened.

So hopefully I’ve given you enough reasons to steer clear of Godaddy for any form of hosting plan. With that, what should you use? Well if you want to be a client of Fascination Design then I would recommend our hosting. If that’s not something you’re interested in then see our article on recommended hosting.

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WordPress vs. Drupal vs. Joomla {infographic}

This is somewhat oversimplified but interesting infographic comparing the three opensource platforms.

Fascination Design uses both WordPress and Drupal based on the client’s needs. Joomla is also a good platform but it’s really an in-between solution which is why we chose to learn the two extremes. WordPress is easier to get started but not quite as robust as Drupal. And Drupal handles more customization and larger e-commerce sites better.

Quick note, there is also a difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. I’ll be doing a review and breakdown of that at a later date.