Archive for the ‘Wordpress’ Category
Sunday, December 6th, 2009
This article, excerpted below, lists 13 reasons why you should NOT have a free wordpress.com web site.
All of them are valid.
The biggest cost of Wordpress is the time it takes you to create a site and make it what you want it to be. The biggest downside to using a free service is lack of control.
I suggest that you try out a free site, (after all, it’s free), and learn the ropes.
When you are ready for a “real” web site, then get your own web host and install Wordpress. You can point everything on the free site at the new site.
With your very own web site, you have complete control of everything! Sell stuff! Publish what you want. Make it professional and compete with other businesses. Rock the world.
Final thoughts.
13 reasons why you should NOT have a free wordpress.com web site.
If you already have a free Wordpress site, and it is your only blog/website, I suggest one of two things. 1) Buy a domain, install wordpress and start fresh. You can always direct people to your new blog from your old blog, or 2) Export all your content from your free site into a paid site, then you’ll have everything in one place. The sooner you do this the better in my opinion.
That said, blogging communities are great and should not be ignored. Having a free blog within a blogging community however, is very different than having a website all your own. Of all the free blogging communities around, I like Tumblr the best. Here is a list of some of the most popular blogging communities.
Wordpress is a blog application found at Wordpress.org
Wordpress is free to use. It’s called open source.
Wordpress is awesome. Smart people use it.
Wordpress.com is a place to be part of a blogging community.
A free Wordpress blog doesn’t make sense as your only blog.
A free Wordpress blog is a great way to learn the ropes.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.socialmediatherapy.com/2009/07/03/a-free-wordpress-blog-can-really-cost-you/
Posted in Wordpress |
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
I responded to comment on the original post about Headway this morning.
Headway 1.5 Premium Wordpress Theme
Andrew wanted to know what it could “do”. That’s a reasonable question, so I thought I’d try to answer it.
I think the list of features, or the actual tasks it can do, is probably similar to other premium themes. The big “woah” moment for me was the visual editor.
I had an event happen a week ago that caused me to need to get a site up quickly, like from nothing, no idea or content, to functioning site in like 4 hours.
I could have copied an existing site, using my old handcoded theme and thrown it up, changed the colors and been done with it, but I used Headway.
It was easy to create the pages in Wordpress, then play with the visual editor to decide colors and layout.
I could add a wigetized sidbar, or 3, and put them where I wanted them.
I could control the width by click and drag to the width I wanted. Changing the width of the sidebay is usually going into the CSS file and guessing, then reloading the page, then guessing again. With this, I clicked and dragged until I was happy.
Of course the color pickers were easy and wonderful. You clicked on the element you wanted to color, and clicked on the color picker. That element was now that color.
I want to be sure I’m communicating this clearly. I like this theme, not because it “does stuff”, but that it does stuff in a visual editor. It’s value is not in what it does, but in how it does it.
You can select elements in a drop down menu and style them from there, but you can also just click on the area that you want to style to select it.
The visual editor is a bunch of “floating palettes” over the top of your page. You have to move the palettes around sometimes, to see what’s behind them on the page.
I also used Headway premium Wordpress theme to build my coming business site, You Can Sell Crafts. I spent less than two hours on that site. I’m not promoting that much yet and the products aren’t in place, so I just needed a quick and dirty site for now.
I like it though.
The SEO stuff is great. The transition stuff is great. I haven’t tried the image stuff yet, but I’m sure that’s all great too. Whatever, dude. All the other premium themes out there are great too.
What's totally awesome (I do live near the beach and have long hair, so I can say that without irony) is the visual editor.
But what’s awesome, what’s totally awesome (I do live near the beach and have long hair, so I can say that without irony) is the visual editor. That’s what takes this theme to a new level. When they say “design visually”, that’s what they mean.
It’s like building a site in Photoshop instead of BBEdit, where I usually work. You don’t even have to go to a settings page, save the settings, then check the page. None of that.
You are seeing the page as you design the page, on the page, without leaving the page.
I’ll even complain about the lack of control on absolutely everything. If something needs to be styled or added, but it’s not in the drop down to be selected, I can do it through the editor, by changing the style sheet manually, which is what I’m used to. No loss. No gain.
But, I’m telling you, this visual editor changed the rules.
Woah, dude.
Posted in Wordpress |
Saturday, November 21st, 2009
How much control do you want?
Here is a great, simple explanation of the differences between Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org.
It’s a balance of simple and no control against difficult and total control.
Being the control freak that I am, I always choose control. I want you, as my client, to have as much control as you can. I can make the total control of your own web site a little bit simpler, and be there when you have questions.
Which do you choose?
Hosting: Self or Other
The biggest major difference between the two WordPresses is that the dot com version is hosted for you for free on Automattic’s servers, while the dot org version is software you install on your own web server. Automattic is the parent company of WordPress. Hosting with WordPress.com means you save a lot of money, because it’s free, and you never have to worry about your server crashing. You never have to worry about upgrades, because they’re automatic. Everything just works.
To receive those benefits requires you to give up something very important to a business: sovereignty. You don’t control the software or the server. There are incredible extras and freedoms unavailable to you if you go with the dot com version of WordPress. If you install WordPress on your own web server, we call that self-hosted WordPress to quickly tell which flavor of WordPress we’re talking about.
Self-hosted is a double-edged sword. With great freedom comes great responsibility. You have access to scads of themes and plugins that will let you do amazing things with WordPress that you can’t do on the dot com version—it’s like getting the keys to the kingdom. But you’re responsible for managing everything and keeping it updated. Plugins, themes, and WordPress itself require constant upgrading and backing up. Sometimes there are glitches that can only be solved by people who really know what they’re doing. If that’s not you, then you must have access to a qualified person.
Read the entire article at:
http://remarkablogger.com/2009/11/19/wordpress-com-vs-wordpress-org-the-definitive-overview-for-business
Posted in Wordpress |
Saturday, November 14th, 2009
I’ve just made the most amazing discovery this morning.
Headway 1.5 Premium Wordpress Theme
I’ve always built my own custom theme for any site I built. I’ve looked at Thesis and other “premium” themes and none of them could really do any better than I can by writing my own code.
…until now.
Today Headway released the latest version of their premium theme. It’s got the usual list of updated features and that’s all nice and good, but they also released a visual editor.
I’ve hated visual editors since I first used Dreamweaver 1.0. I don’t even use the one that’s built into Wordpress.
This one is different.
This one has built is color pickers. You can resize any element on the page. You can add elements to the page. They call them “leafs”, but they are really just “divs” in CSS, which I used to code by hand. Now, I click, drag, drop, pick a color, pick a font. Save. I’m done. It has never been easier.
I think this is the first visual editor that actually works.
I think this is the first visual editor that actually works and my clients can understand how to use it.
My first concern is if it can do everything that I can do by hand. There are a couple tricky things with the layout that I can do, but this does 95% of anything I would ever want it to do. It will do 100% of everything that you will ever want it to do.
My other concern is if it will be easy enough to use. The most obvious stuff is amazingly simple to accomplish. There are some things that you have to learn a little code to do. It’s got the hooks so that if you know the code and want to go hard core on it, it will allow you to. If you have the knowledge, you can do anything. If you don’t know the code, you don’t know the things that you can’t do. It’s that powerful.
If the biggest cost to building a Wordpress site is time, then this will cut your design time in half and save you money.
I can finally recommend a premium theme for Wordpress and I’m the most cynical guy you’ll meet when it comes to new stuff like this. If you are looking for a more powerful, easy to use way to customize your own Wordpress blog, you need to check out Headway.
Do it now.
Posted in Wordpress |
Sunday, September 13th, 2009
I had the privilege to attend WordCamp LA on Saturday. It’s a gathering of geeks who love Wordpress. There were presentations all day long. I expected to enjoy being around other people with similar interests and hearing some great, hard core geeky Wordpress developer stuff that I wouldn’t quite be able to keep up with. I expected to be bored for most of it.
It was nothing like that.
The first speaker was the one that I came for. Shayne Sanderson talked about using the WP-ecommerce plugin in Wordpress MU, the multi user version. I never knew that would work and apparently it wouldn’t up until a couple weeks ago. Huge shout out to Shayne for the presentation and then letting me bug him afterwards. He was very gracious and helpful, even as I asked more and more questions. Huge help to me and I’m very grateful.
I plan on taking this technology and making it available to you. We’ll be working on a new site that will allow you, or anyone, the ability to create a new blog, pick a theme, and have an inventory system to load all of your products into, then sell them in a shopping cart. We plan to only charge a monthly fee and not a transaction fee like some people we know.
We’ll back all of that up with some training material to help you through the process of setting up your own business of selling your own products.
We’re aiming this at crafters, but it will work for anyone who needs an ecommerce site, a site that sells stuff and accepts payment.
Imagine being able to work in your own home. You can have your own web site to sell your products and make enough money to meet your goals.
It’s possible and it’s coming. Subscribe to our news letter to be the first to know when it’s available.
Back on track. The next speaker was Ben Huh. He’s the CEO of the company that publishes I Can Has Cheezburger and the FAIL blog. Go ahead. Go read the sites. I know you want to, so I’ll wait here.
see more Lolcats and funny pictures
You’re back? Cool. He’s a funny guy, as you might imagine and I didn’t expect much more than that, a good time. He proceeded to explain their business methodology. MPH stands for Mr. Potato Head. It means that if a part of your business falls off, it’s ugly, but nobody dies. It also means that if you add a part to your business, it’s ugly, but everybody lives. He said that they focus on exactly what they need to do to get the job done and no more. You need to let go of the ego, kill the sacred cows, and lose the attitude. Be lazy. Do what your users want and that’s it. They outsource everything they can.
The results of this apparent slacker attitude? 8.2 million page views a day. He wouldn’t talk about how money they make, but the company has 21 employees.
Micah Baldwin talked about Failure being job one. The difference between failure and losing. If you have a failure, it’s only an event along the path to success. If you lose, that’s the end. There is no more. He pointed out that America loves a failure who succeeds, but hate a loser. Don’t be a loser. Get back up and fail again.
Andrew Warner talked about how to put video on a web site. I figured that I knew everything about video. I own and use Final Cut pro. I’ve put together some nice stuff out there. Oh, wait. None of my stuff is on the web, not really. He showed some crazy easy ways to produce good stuff and put it on the web. There are tools that I wasn’t aware of. Now I am. Now I’m hot to do video. Training videos. Blog post videos. I’m gonna do it. Watch this space.
John Hawkins ended up by talking about how to develop a plug in for Wordpress. I always wanted to get around to learning that someday, but I knew it would be hard and I would fail and I wouldn’t like it. He was the most technical speaker, but I kept up and he made it look easy. I’m encouraged. I can do this thing. Look for a plugin coming sometime soon too.
During all of this whole day, I was hanging out with my old friend, Doug Wade. We used to go to MacWorld together, back in the early days of the Internet. I have a lot of friends, but he’s one of the few who get this part of me. I really appreciate him. I didn’t realize how much I missed him until I saw him there. Check out his blog.
Posted in Wordpress |
Friday, March 20th, 2009
Search Engine Results Pages = SERPs
Who knows what magic algorithm Google uses to calculate what to return on those search pages? I’ve read about them. I’ve studied them. I’ve tested them. I don’t understand them. The more I know, the more I realize how much I don’t know.
I have a site that I’ve been trying to get ranked high. Per my research and everything I know about the on-page and off-page SEO and the competition, it should be doing pretty well. When I published it, it was #8 on the first page. Since then, it’s been slowly moving backward.
Down, down, down, into a burning ring of fire. – Johnny Cash
It’s been beyond page 3 for the last week or so, i.e., it doesn’t exist. I was bummed. What was I doing wrong? I knew a couple things I could do to make it better. I needed to work on the off-page back-links. I’ll get to those after some client work that needed to get done.
I check again this morning and it’s back on the first page! #10 with a bullet! I do some research on it and it seems that Google rolled through another one of my sites and recorded a bunch of links from those pages.
I guess my point is that random chance still has something to do with how you are rated on Google. The more I know, the more I realize how much they don’t know. They apparently are not quite networked with God yet, so they don’t quite know everything, all the time, everywhere. Yet.
If you are doing the best SEO you can and not getting the results you expect, give it some time. Time seems to be the great equalizer. Random chance will settle down over the long haul and the trends will stabilize.
You’ll get there. It will just take a while, or maybe a bolt of lightning.
SERP Position by Date
| Date |
Position |
Page |
URL |
| February 26, 2009 |
9 |
1 |
www.site.com/ |
| February 28, 2009 |
9 |
1 |
www.site.com/ |
| March 1, 2009 |
8 |
1 |
www.site.com/ |
| March 2, 2009 |
16 |
2 |
www.site.com/ |
| March 3, 2009 |
18 |
2 |
www.site.com/ |
| March 4, 2009 |
18 |
2 |
www.site.com/ |
| March 5, 2009 |
17 |
2 |
www.site.com/ |
| March 6, 2009 |
16 |
2 |
www.site.com/ |
| March 7, 2009 |
25 |
3 |
www.site.com/ |
| March 8, 2009 |
25 |
3 |
www.site.com/ |
| March 11, 2009 |
25 |
3 |
www.site.com/ |
| March 12, 2009 |
24 |
3 |
www.site.com/ |
| March 13, 2009 |
Not in first 30. |
Not in first 3. |
No Pages Found |
| March 15, 2009 |
Not in first 30. |
Not in first 3. |
No Pages Found |
| March 17, 2009 |
Not in first 30. |
Not in first 3. |
No Pages Found |
| March 19, 2009 |
Not in first 30. |
Not in first 3. |
No Pages Found |
| March 20, 2009 |
10 |
1 |
www.site.com/ |
Posted in DNS, SEO, Wordpress, free |
Thursday, January 29th, 2009
I will attempt to explain how to convert an existing site into Wordpress. I wrote previously about converting a client’s site from old school tables to a CSS based Wordpress theme at http://www.flowerart.biz. I think this should work for Frontpage based sites as well as DreamWeaver or any other site that is reasonably coded, that is, if you “saved as HTML” from MS Word, you’re on your own.
A lot of people are looking for this information, so I figure I should expand on it and tell you exactly what I did and how you can convert any existing web site into a Wordpress themed site too.
How To Convert An Existing Site To Wordpress
The concept of a theme is that it will be the framework, the common template, that all of your content will be displayed inside of. Normally, you will use the same look and feel, the same template, on all of your pages. This usually contains the header, the sidebars, the footer, and the content goes in the middle and changes from page to page. We’ll want to take the existing HTML files and slice them up into Wordpress theme files, with a dynamic place in the middle to put all of the content.
Text Edit
Did I mention that you need a text editor to make Wordpress theme files? MS Word will not work. You MUST be able edit the files and save them as “text” files. They can not be formatted in any way. On Windows, look for WordPad. On a Mac, look for TextEdit. Do not make them RTF, or Rich Text Format. Just save the files as simple old text.
Quick shout out for BBEdit on a Mac. The ultimate text editor and if you’re going to be doing this, worth every penny. It does not suck. Says so right on the box.
Set Up Dev
Before we get any farther, you’ll need a development installation of Wordpress that you can play with and break. It can’t share the database with an existing installation, or the theme you pick here will be the theme that the existing site will get at the same time.
If you do not have an installation of Wordpress yet, install it and we’ll just play with it until we’re happy with the new theme. No one is looking. No one cares. Feel free to break it all you want.
If you do have an existing installation, you need to make another installation. It’s easy, but pay attention. You will have the existing site in your top level. You’ll probably have a “wordpress” folder with all of the files in it, in that top level. Make a copy, or upload a new copy, of Wordpress right next to that folder. Name the new folder “dev”. You will now have the existing Worpress in “wordpress” and the new one right next to it, named “dev”.
Take the existing wp-config.php file and download it to your hard drive, where you can edit it. Open it up and look for the line that says ” $table_prefix = ‘wp_’; “. That “wp_” is the prefix for all of the tables in the database that Wordpress uses. We don’t want to create a new database. We want to create new tables inside the existing database. We leave everything else in this file alone, but we change the “wp_” to “dev_”. Our new installation will see that and go create a new set of tables, all with names beginning with “dev_”.
Upload that wp-config.php file and upload it to our new “dev” installation. It should be next to all of the other “wp-”folders, at the top level.
Now, we’ll let Wordpress do it’s thing. This is where the Wordpress is so much better than any other Content Management System out there. We’ll finish the installation using your web browser.
Go to the home page of the new “dev” Wordpress installation. If you have a previous installation, type in that URL, followed by /dev/, which is the folder that we put the dev Wordpress. If this is a new installation, then you can go to the new home page. You should be looking at a new installation page that says “welcome”. You need to fill in the Name of the new site and your email address.
Click on the Install Wordpress button. Wait for a really long time while Wordpress goes out and updates the database and installs all of the information that it needs. This might take up 10 seconds on a slow day.
You will be looking at a Success! page. The user name is “admin” and the password is some totally obscure random string. Log into the new site and look around. You now have a development site that we can install themes on and break if we want to.
Lift and Separate
We want to go back to looking at the existing site that you want to convert. We want to lift the HTML from it and separate it into Wordpress theme files.
The basic task is to separate out the “theme” elements from the “content” elements. If you have a stack of HTML files on your server and you’re not sure how they all work, download them and look at them in a text editor.
You need to have some background in HTML to know what you are looking at. You’re going to have to read the HTML and figure out what it is doing. You’ll see a lot of stuff at the top, in the <head> section. The next should be the header area, all the stuff at the top. Somewhere down after that, will be what looks like content, the actual writing.
Your task, and this is the hardest part, is to figure out exactly where the “top” stuff stops and the “content” stuff starts. It could be a table cell. It could be a <div> tag. You need to find that point.
In the simplest form, there’s a bunch of HTML, then there’s content, then there’s a bunch more HTML. The goal is to slice that HTML into files named “header.php”, “sidebar.php”, “footer.php”, and most importantly, “index.php”. There could be others, but we’ll talk about that later.
Slice off the top stuff and put it in the “header.php” file. Figure out where the side bar stuff might come and copy it into that. You don’t really need a sidebar file if you don’t want to have one or you might want a couple, using sidebar-right.php and sidebar-left.php. You’ll have to go through your code and look at the layout of the page.
Take the bottom stuff and put it in the footer.php. You saw that coming, didn’t you?
You’re left with the content. You need to create an “index.php” file. At the top, you want to have the tag <?php get_header(); ?>. At the bottom, you want to have the <?php get_footer(); ?> tag. You can put your sidebars in where you want them, before or after the content, for left or right.
In the middle of the index page, you want to put in the magic PHP tags that display the content. Open up the default theme index.php file and look at it. Copy everything starting at the <?php if (have_posts()) : ?> tag down to the <?php endif; ?> tag. You’ll get a bunch of “class=entry” and “php_content()” tags.
Save all of these files into a new theme folder. You’re doing all of this on your hard drive. Name the new theme whatever you want. “MyNewTheme” sounds great. Copy the style sheet from the default theme into your new theme folder. If you already have a style sheet from your original site, use that instead.
Open the .css style sheet file. You want to have the new name so that it shows up in the Appearance page in Wordpress. At the top of the file, you need to have at least “/* Theme Name: MyNewTheme */”. The slash and asterisk means that it’s “commented out” so that it doesn’t interfere with the style sheet. Don’t use the quotes, just the slashes and asterisks. Look at the default theme style sheet or the codex for more info. This is minimum.
Upload and Look
Upload your theme folder to the “wp-content” themes folder, next to the default and classic themes. Go to your Themes page in Wordpress admin and see if your theme is there. If it is, select it and activate it. Hold your breathe and “View Site”.
Did it work? Did it break? If you have horrible text that displays PHP error messages, read what they say and try to figure out where the error is. It’s probably a missing closing tag or a missing semi-colon. I hate those.
Did it display something, but it’s all out of whack? You need to play with the style sheets and the theme files to get it to display correctly.
Fix it
The simplest situation here is that you copied the code straight out of the original files and plopped it in here and it all works.
The issues could be style sheets, missing code, or badly written HTML. The more you change from original, the more you need to know what you are doing.
Pages
After you get it working and looking right, you want to create new pages for each page in the new site. Just create them and put some gibberish for now. You just want a place holder. Make sure that the menu points to the right places. Menus will be the next issue.
Existing Pages
If you have pages that you just don’t want to convert, you can put them into the Worpdress top folder, so that they act like normal pages. In my example, all of the portfolio pages are still hard coded PHP files. http://www.flowerart.biz/portfolio/ I needed to make sure the menus work, but those are hard coded pages. They are not visible in Wordpress, but they are visible to the user. Read “Put A Wordpress Menu In An External Page” to see how I made the menus dynamic on a hard coded page.
Menus
If you want to have dynamic menus, where pages are added to the menu when you create the pages, then you need to read through the codex about menu tags and their attributes. It’s possible to cut out the hard coded HTML menu that you had and replace it with a dynamic one. See where to cut out the old one and replace it with the new tags.
Different Templates
If you have different templates for different pages, you need to know what the differences are. If you need to create a new template for each page, you can do that. Go into each old HTML file, cut out the “contents” and replace it per the directions above. Now, create a new file that will act like that specific page’s index.php file. I like to name them all starting with “template_”, so you might have template_aboutus.php.
These new template pages need to have all of the tags of the others, header() and footer() and that stuff. It’s possible to have a template page that is entirely custom HTML and not even use the content() tags. You won’t be able to edit it, but it’ll show up on the site and be managed like other pages.
Each one of these new template pages needs to have the commented out lines at the top of the file that has the name in this format: “/* Template Name: About Us */”, again, without the quotes.
Upload this new file to the theme folder, next to the index.php file. Go back to the page that needs to use this template. On the right, there’s a “Template” drop down menu that should now list all of the template files that contain that “Template Name:” line in them. Select the one you want to use for that page and update.
Go look at it. You will have to customize and fix each template to make sure it works with the pages that you want.
Final Touches
You will have to go through each page and make sure that the menus work and that they look right. You can use the default theme as a guide. You can look up specific problems in the codex or the forums or you can ask me.
From here on out, it will be stylesheets and php tags to get it to look and work right. If you have a specific problem, let me know in the comments below and we can walk through it.
Posted in Wordpress |
Monday, January 26th, 2009
Wordpress is free.
I saw an article recently listing 10 free web site building tools. Most of them take a while to figure out. They won’t all let you do what you want to do. None were expandable to your own site if you ever wanted to take the next step, from “free” to “owning your own”.
The biggest cost is time.
It made me think about what the real costs of a web platform are. The biggest cost is time. How long does it take you to learn how to work it and make it do what you want it to do? How much is it going to frustrate you and make you figure out how to do something simple?
In my experience with Wordpress, and I’m coming at this from a developer point of view, it’s much easier and intuitive to learn to use Wordpress than with any other platform out there. When I build a site for a client using Wordpress, it’s much easier to train them and get them up to speed on Wordpress than other systems that I’ve tried.
Let’s look at the cost it would take to put a wordpress site on your own server and run it for a year. Domain name is $10. Don’t pay more than that for a domain name. Hosting packages can be had for less than $80 a year. Call the whole thing $100 for a year of hosting your own site.
If you use a good host, they would have an auto install version of Wordpress. Click, click, bang. It’s set up. Play with a theme. Spend too much time looking on line for a theme. Download, install. Play with plug ins. Download, install. Write a few posts. Create a few pages. Change the layout a bit. Call it 8 hours total, from start to having your own blog on line, working, with your own theme and content. You have added the plug-ins that you wanted, the theme that you wanted, the layout, the content, the menu. All of it is exactly what you want.
The cost in time is really because you have TOO MANY options. If you can be satisfied with what comes out of the box, then a Wordpress site can be set up in 20 minutes.
Compare that to another free host. Set up is quick and easy. Pick a theme. There are 20. Write a post. Change the layout? No. Can’t do that. Put the menu on the other side? No. Can’t do that. You want to post video? No. Can’t do that either. Podcast? Special functionality? Nope. None of that.
You’ve spent the same 8 hours trying to do stuff and not being able to that you would have on Wordpress. It’s $100 cheaper and maybe that’s the difference for you. It doesn’t look quite like you want it to and it doesn’t have quite the right functionality. It’s harder to use and takes longer to post than Wordpress. If it takes 3 minutes longer and you make 20 posts, that’s an hour. How many posts in a year?
This reminds me of the difference between Windows and a Mac. The Mac costs a bit more to start, but lasts twice a long, lets you work twice as fast, and makes it easier to do anything you want. Which is a better deal? How much is your time worth? How much money do you have?
It’s all up to you, but if you have $100 to spend on a web site for a year, spend it and build a Wordpress site. You’ll thank me at the end of the year.
Posted in Wordpress |
Monday, January 12th, 2009
I ran into an old friend recently. The usual questions were asked about what’s happened in the 20 years since we’ve seen each other. Yes, I do web sites.
They said they were about to update their web site. Their spouse had created it and they wanted to add some features and update the look. I suggested that they use Wordpress. I sounded like the fan boy that I am.
They were pleasant, but said they already had hosting with GoDaddy and they would just use the web blog application that they provided as part of the hosting package. They had heard of Wordpress and that it was good, but they would use what they had.
I continued on about how cool Wordpress is. They were very nice, but had decided that they didn’t want to pay anything extra when they already had a blogging application included in their hosting package.
I checked it out on my own GoDaddy account. It sucked! It had a tenth of the functionality and the interface was horrible.
Did I mention that it's free?
I told them again that they should use Wordpress. I told them that it is free. You can install it anywhere. It’s got features, and blah blah blah, and IT’S FREE!
Oh. That’s quite different. It’s free you say? You don’t have to buy it?
No! It’s FREE. You can download it, install it, pick a theme, put in some plug ins and have a complete, professional web site FOR FREE.
They said they would check it out. They thanked me profusely. Told me that I had motivated them to get going on their web site.
I have no idea if they will do anything on it at all, but I guess I was shocked that not everyone has the same understanding and knowledge and beliefs that I do. Silly me.
People seem to think that to get cool software, you have to spend money. If you don’t spend money, then you can have cool software. People can’t wrap their heads around the whole “open source” thing.
If you happen to not be aware, Wordpress is free. There is no cost. You can download it and install it on any web server that’s running MySQL and Apache (which is almost every web server these days). You can control all aspects of it. You can build your own theme if you want. You can do anything with it.
Did I mention that it’s free?
Posted in Wordpress |
Friday, December 19th, 2008
Back in the dark ages, the days before Wordpress, I created a site for a friend using the latest and greatest methods of the day, tables. I happened to be great at laying out and implementing tables for designing web pages. I even taught a class in how to do it for the large aerospace company I worked for back then. This was back when we were still afraid of the Millennium Bug.
I happened to be great at laying out and implementing tables for designing web pages.
I taught him how to replace images when he wanted and how to write a bit of PHP and HTML. He learned, but I don’t think that he ever made any changes, maybe a few images. This is a wedding flower site, so there are a lot of images.
Fast forward to a couple weeks ago. He wants to add some videos and a video page. I have just written a book on how Wordpress is so wonderful for everything, so I figure I really need to convert his old school web site into Wordpress.
Wordpress is great with CSS and I’m a huge believer in CSS myself, so it was particularly difficult to read this old code that I wrote years ago, using tables. One of the cool design features of his site is that every page is a bit different in layout. There are random images strewn about the place. I used multiple templates and passed variables to change the images.
To convert the old site to Wordpress, without having to recreate the whole thing, meant that I needed to create new template pages for each section, using the existing tables, then assign the templates to the pages.
I threw in a div in the middle for the content on most. The front page is totally custom, so I actually have the template as the entire HTML page, with no content displayed at all. It’s just an HTML page.
The tricky part was the menus. I learned how to do child menus for the Venues pages, so that each venue gets its’ own page with a submenu of all other venue pages, because they are children of the Venue page which lists them all. I’ll do another post on menus to explain that better.
It took a lot of tweaks, but I finally got it to work. The decisions had to be made on which data would be hard coded and what would be “content”. He’s got to have the freedom to make changes to a lot of it, but I didn’t want him to be able to make changes to other parts.
I think it turned out OK. Please don’t view the source on it, unless you want to see some ugly code. Ack. It all works though. It’s possible to convert an existing site into Wordpress.
http:/www.flowerart.biz
Posted in Wordpress |
Fair Winds and Calm Seas,
Deborah Leon
www.mermaidspurseseaglass.com
