What the experts have to say: Their top WordPress Tips

In the interviews we conducted with the WordCamp speakers we asked them to share one WordPress tip that they felt was indispensable, and here is what they had to say:

Roy Foubister

“Rip open each plugin and see how it works, you are adding extra code to your project – know what it does!”

Joe Botha

“Use SVN to keep your blog versions current.”

David Perel

“NEVER hack it, with WordPress you can always use the core code to achieve your goal.”

Marc Perel

“If you think you need to create a custom function for something, do some Googling first. It’s most likely available in the source.”

Byron Rode

“Try not to use plugins where possible. Upgrading becomes a nightmare, and 9/10 you’ll find the reason for poor performance and hacks is due to badly developed plugins.”

Ashley Shaw

“The less plugins, the better. They are the root of all evil.”

Dan Milward

“If you’re a developer looking to get into WordPress then buy this book by Justin Tadlock“

Neil Pursey

“A basic tip is to ensure that you’ve added a .htaccess file to the root folder and rewrite the url structure to ‘custom’ and insert /%postname%/ into the field.”

Jess Green

“Learn as much as you can about SEO content. My blog posts have ranked so well and received so many comments sometimes that my business grows organically purely from that.”

Matt Geri

“Go mobile! There are many plugins you can use to turn your WordPress blog into a mobile blog and it shouldn’t take you more than 5 minutes to pick and install one.”

David Mugo

“PHP 5 & MySQL 5 – Best combination, no more worry about folder permissions and so forth. Just create your database and move on with the 3 minute installation.”

Jeff Pearce

“Spend some time going through the core WordPress code. There is a goldmine of learning in there! It might be daunting at first, but I’ve learnt the most from spending time just reading the code.”

Craig Strachan

“The first thing you should do when you install WP is to change the permalink structure to be more friendly – /%postname%/”

Oluniyi Ajao

“Always make use of trackbacks, where possible. The backlinks are worth the time.”

Adii Pienaar

“Keep plugins to an absolute minimum. Mo’ plugins, mo’ problems.”

It seems that the dangers of plugins and good SEO are the top tips from our experts that everyone can agree on. The full WordCamp Speaker Spotlight Interviews and the Speaker Session videos are available on the WordCamp website and on YouTube.

Do you have an expert WordPress tip to share?

The Facts:

• 60% of your page rank is calculated by what others do in response to your site. Each click on those buttons generates a social page for your post, in turn generating a valuable inbound link from a very authoritative domain.
• Enabling your content to be shared across social media platforms, extends the reach of your content. This makes the money spent on creating content go further.

5 Tips to Optimize Your Website for Social Media

1. Group and Display your Social Media Icons Prominently

Icons linking to your social accounts should be displayed in the top-right corner of your home page for optimal visibility.

2. Feature Social Network Widgets in the Sidebar
  
Displaying Social widgets in your sidebar gives your customers an easy way to follow you with a single click. It also provides social proof by displaying how many followers or fans you have.

3. Display your Latest Tweets in the Sidebar

Entice the visitors to your website to join in the conversation by displaying your latest tweets in your sidebar or footer.

4. Display the Image Thumbnails of your Blogpost in the Sidebar

A picture is worth a thousand words. Include your blogposts image thumbnail on your blog post to generate interest in your blogs. While your at it, consider creating a unique thumbnail for each blogpost.

5. Display Social Media Sharing Buttons at the top or bottom of your Blogposts

Having social media sharing buttons clearly visible at the top (if not then on the bottom) of your blogposts and other content makes it easy for visitors to share your content and spread the word. These buttons usually have counters included, displaying how many people have shared your content. This serves as social proof of your content.

LightSpeed is proud to officially announce that WordCamp Cape Town 2011 is on and coming to the mother city this September!

We are striving to make this the biggest South African WordCamp yet, with top notch speakers from all over the globe (countries represented include SA, New Zealand, Ghana and Kenya) delving into everything WordPress!

The Details:

Date: 15 September 2011
Venue: The Alba Lounge, V&A Waterfront
Location: Cape Town
Price: R135 (includes lunch and a nifty WordCamp Cape Town t-shirt). Tickets are available at http://www.entrytickets.co.za/eventview/WCT2011
Theme: Spring has Sprung

WordCamp Cape Town Badges

The Forge has designed some kick-ass badges for WordCamp CT participants to download and post on their blogs, websites and social media profiles:

Speakers

WordCamp Cape Town 2011 will offer 2 tracks of talks and workshops:

Content Managers and Publishers

This track will focus on the role of content in WordPress Web development, including blogging, content creation, content management and content strategy.

Development

The development track will be focused on the more technical aspects of developing with WordPress, including Plugins, User Interface design and scalability.

There will be slots for 20 speakers to deliver their presentations. Presentations should be 30 – 45min long and there will be a short Q&A session after each talk.

Speakers that have been confirmed include Dan Milward (Instinct) Ashley Shaw (LightSpeed and Feedmymedia), Adii Pienaar (Woothemes) and Matt Bush (Haycroft Media). To see the full list of Speakers, click HERE.

There are still some Speaker slots to fill, so if you want to get involved and wow the WordPress community with your thoughts and insights, don’t hesitate and fill out the Call for Speakers form on the official WordCamp Cape Town 2011 website.

Sponsors

Sponsors are essential to a successful event, as WordCamps are run entirely by volunteers and the only funds available are those from ticket sales and our community supporters. Supporting WordCamp Cape Town 2011 makes tickets affordable for a wide variety of attendees, including freelancers and small business owners with limited funds.

Supporters that have been confirmed are LightSpeed (platinum sponsor), Missing Link (Platinum Sponsor) and WooThemes (Gold Sponsor).

If you want to get involved and help make this WordCamp the most successful South Africa has ever seen, click over to the official WordCamp Cape Town 2011 website and fill out the Call for Sponsors form.

Any and all contributions are welcomed!

It’s All About WordPress

WordCamp Cape Town 2011 is shaping up to be a great event and LightSpeed is looking forward to seeing you all there!

Jetpack for WordPress has been rolled out with the following functions free to use:

Gravatar Hovercards

Show sa pop-up business card of your users’ gravatar profiles in comments. Hovercards enhance plain Gravatar images with information about a person: name, bio, pictures, their contact info, and other services. Simply mouse over their image in the comments section and the hovercard will appear.

WordPress.com Stats

WordPress.com Stats has been our preferred Statistic plugin for ages. Now a part of Jetpack, it displays the most popular metrics in an easy to understand manner with no additional load on your server.

Twitter Widget

Shows your latest twitter updates within a sidebar on your theme.

After the Deadline

Adds spell, style, and grammar checking to WP, and provides a number of customization options.

LaTeX

Use the LaTex markup language for writing complex mathematical equations and formulas.

Sharedaddy

Makes sharing content across Social Media platforms easy with social sharing buttons for Facebook, Twitter, and many more underneath your posts.

WP.me Shortlinks

Enable WP.me-powered shortlinks for all of your Posts and Pages for easier sharing using the incredibly compact wp.me domain name.

Shortcode Embeds

Enter a shortcode directly into the Post/Page editor to embed media to easily embed videos and more from sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and SlideShare.

Some of the plugins contained within Jetpack aren’t new to the WordPress community and have been around in stand alone form for quite some time. Take care and test thoroughly when adding Jetpack to existing live sites as it may cause some compatibility issues with existing plugins.

Our developers are simply gaga over this amazing plugin, and here’s why:

LightSpeed and the WP e-Commerce Plugin

LightSpeed has a long history of supporting the WP e-Commerce plugin. In those rare cases that it has fallen short of our needs we’ve been happy to help out with fixes to the code, like when our fix to the coupon code was integrated into WP eCommerce with version 3.7.6.6.

WP E-COMMERCE DRIVING VIVI-KOLA

Our WordPress website solution for new client Vivi Kola involves an online store with multiple payment gateways, shipping and taxes.

Examples of LightSpeed using the WP e-Commerce Hooks and Filters

WP e-Commerce’s many hooks and filters allows our developers to write Plugins for WP e-Commerce in much the same way that you can write a Plugin for WordPress itself.

It allows us to add extra information to a product if the standard one does not have what you want, like adding a barcode image in addition to the SKU “stock keeping unit”.

We can also build custom Payment Gateways that integrate seamlessly with the plugin or as an additional menu when you click “add to cart” which lets you select how many products you want added to the cart ( instead of clicking add to cart several times).

Our developers have been actively working on the Members Access Plugin – which allows you to sell access to password protected pages and posts on your website – extending it and adding functionality.

WordPress e-Commerce: A dream for developers

When compared to the other e-Commerce Plugins available for WordPress, it’s clear that the WP e-Commerce Plugin is the platform for growth and better suited to developers.

Instinct held off releasing their the latest version (WP e-Commerce 3.8) for two years to ensure that the new release is a lean and slick thing of beauty. It is half the size and has half the code of the original, with many features stripped out and reshaped into Plugins, adding to the extensibility of the core Plugin.

As a result the latest 3.8.x release version has the most refined feature set of all the WordPress e-Commerce Plugins. These features include:

• Radically improved theming capabilities. Now the frontend is controlled via normal WordPress theme files.
• Over 200 hooks and filters for developers. This superior offering of hooks and filters allow us to add additional capabilities to your site without having to edit the plugin.
• Extensive Developer Documentation has everything you need to know to get started.
• Utilizes Custom Post Types, WP taxonomies for Product Categories and Variation Sets

Community

Of the other options out there, no one has the community around it that WPEC does.

The reason WP e-Commerce has the community it has is two-fold.

1. Engagement – Dan and the whole Instinct crew are highly involved in contributing to the WordPress community through attending, speaking at or sponsoring WordCamps, contributing code back to WordPress core, as well as supporting the community by funding open-source development. Through their community work they have got core WordPress developers to assist in improving the plugin architecture, this has proved invaluable.
2. Developer outreach – WP e-Commerce  has a community of developers that spans the entire globe. With over 200 hooks, WordPress e-Commerce has made it incredibly easy for an ordinary guy to build something special on top of it.
3. Support – excellent assistance and integration with premium WordPress themes. WordPress e-Commerce offers it’s users the opportunity to contribute on the community Support Forum, comment on the GetShopped.org Blog and customers of their Premium Plugins can make use of the complimentary Premium Support service.

Advantages

Beyond WP eCommerce’ ease of use for the more seasoned developer, it also has a whole stack of advantages over it’s closest competitors for the less tech savvy web builder:

• The installation process and configuration of the various settings is extremely simple and easy to understand
• Adding additional products is easy
• Easy customization using widgets
• Marketing and cross promotion tools are available
• A wide range of payment gateways are built into the plugin. These include PayPal, Google checkout, Chronopay, Authorize.net and many more

Exciting things coming up

Currently we are working with Instinct on developing a Canvas Child Wootheme. We hope that this code will be adopted as part of the WooCommerce framework, and help contribute to the start of the much anticipated WooCommerce.

We will launch a demo of this canvas child theme on feedmyshop.com soon. Keep an eye on this space!

When taking all the features, the community commitment and constant quality of the plugin into account, we are left with no other verdict: WP eCommerce is simply the best WordPress e-Commerce plugin out there, and there can be no substitute.

The Future is Mobile – Are you?

Mobile internet access is growing at a staggering pace. In this changing technological environment it has become ever more prudent to have your WordPress powered business website mobile compatible in order to reach this expanding market of web savvy South Africans.

As reported in The Sunday Times this past Sunday, the sale of smartphones has just surpassed the sale of PCs for the first time. This was not expected to happen until 2012.

A recent study by Arthur Goldstuck’s World Wide Worx, the Mobility 2011 research project, reveals even more interesting facts. The project’s findings are that 39% of urban South Africans and 27% of rural users are now browsing the Internet on their phones. The study excludes “deep rural” users, and represents around 20-million South Africans aged 16 and above. This means that at least 6-million South Africans now have Internet access on their phones.

This is a bit of a jump from Internet World Stats 2009 statsistics that showed total (not just Mobile) South Africans with internet access to be at 5.3 million.

Increasingly, smartphones and mobile technologies such as tablet PCs are the first point of entry for many into the online world. Right now – and set to increase over the next couple of years –  people who have never had any contact with the internet are making their first contact through the use of mobile telephones. When taking into account that greater competition in the mobile handset market, specifically the market for smartphones, will be driving prices down for these devices, not having a web presence that is mobile device compatible seems like a big strategic over sight.

Really, in the past it has been said that if you don’t have a web presence, your business will lose out. This remains true, but now this has also shifted:

Having a web presence is good, but having a mobile compatible web presence is better.

WPtouch

At LightSpeed we use the impressive plugin, WPtouch to make our websites mobile compatible. WP Touch works by detecting supported devices like iPhones, iPads, Android, Blackberry and more, serving its optimized theme instead of your regular desktop theme. Visitors can always switch back to your desktop theme if they choose.

Recent clients have included Shape magazine, Mom2Mom and Runner’s World.

Shape magazine is one of our South African magazines with an excellent web savvy. Measured against other South African magazines shows Shape to rank #6 for media presence on Facebook and #20 on Twitter according to my estimated cross reference with the figures posted by Media Slut in their recent blog.

Shape magazine knows what it’s doing on the web, and at LightSpeed we know how to enable our clients to make the most of their online business strategy. Contact us for further information on a mobile compatible website for your business and take advantage of the mobile future.

What’s the difference between a single page website and a normal website?

To put it in Geek:

Our Designs

At LightSpeed we’ve come up with many innovative themes for your single page website, each with it’s own unique navigation and look. These themes can be styled to fit your color scheme and corporate branding.

Our previous single page website solutions include a stylish online catalog for Mat Blac handcrafted leather apparel and a unique web based  portfolio for Mememotion, a Cape Town based motion design studio.

If you are looking for a cost effective yet stylish web presence powered by the best content management system, our Single Page Website Package is the place to start.

WordCamp South Africa

LightSpeed wants to host the next WordCamp SA and we need your support!

WordCamp Meetup

The Big Daddy: Suggestions for WordCamp SA 2011

Call for Venue Suggestions

Call for Speaker Suggestions

Our suggestions for Speakers:

Call for Sponsors

Things to consider:

Plinky is a blogging prompt tool, aimed at getting bloggers’ creative juices flowing by giving a short prompt in the form of a sentence, a question or a challenge. You then answer the prompt and also have the capability to add photos or other media, depending on the prompt of the day.

Once you’re done and satisfied you can share your answers on Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

Interested? Let’s take a look at Today’s Prompt

Twittery

Plinky is a bit like twitter, or other similar social networking sites in that you create a profile for yourself, you can follow others and read their posts as they go live, or comment on them.

If that’s not enough, you can even suggest a prompt yourself to the community.

Supported Services

Plinky provides support and integration with a wide variety of social media platforms making it easy to publish your prompt answer to the rest of the world.

The Supported Services include :

• Blogger
• Live journal
• Typepad
• WordPress.com
• WordPress.org
• Xanga
• Facebook
• Twitter
• YOUR BLOG – It provides the embed code to publish your answers straight to your blog!!!!
• Email

The Real Prize

But that’s not all, and hardly the feature that makes it fantastic. Plinky also has a picture finder, that finds pictures to accompany your post based on a keyword that you type in. It gives you a few options, and it’s as simple as selecting the image and posting your answer

-If this sevice (a Keyword Picture finder) where available for use off the Plinky platform and utilizing more creative commons databases than just flickr…well, you can imagine what a prize that would be for bloggers

All in all, Plinky is a very useful tool to any blogger and a service that has amazing potential for growth. Keep an eye on this one!

In the previous post we stated the importance of the business blog. Knowing about the business blog is a good starting point, now we’ll take a look at the uses of the business blog to promote and grow your business.

1. Frequently Asked Questions

Your blog can be utilized as a customer service and information desk for your business. Here you can post answers to Frequently Asked Questions by your customers, This allows you to refer customers to your blog instead of having to respond to each customer via email or over the phone.

2. Contests and Promotions

Contests are a great way to drive traffic to your site and build interest in your company. Fun contests and games that are easy to enter and take part in serve as great promotion and bring your customers back.

3. Photo Blog

Not the Wordy type? Instead of writing, you could put up a daily photo for your customers. A photo and a short description can be very compelling. These can be photos of your staff members, product offerings, team days or anything that could capture the imagination of your customers while staying true to your company’s character.

4. Developer Notes

If you are in the business of developing any type of product – whether it’s software, fashion designs or a new braai spice – a behind the scenes look can often be fascinating for your customers, to see what you are doing and how new projects and products might be moving forward. It’s also an excellent way to build anticipation for your new offering – Just make sure that you deliver!

5. News

Keep your customers informed by blogging about the latest news in your area of expertise or about the specific topic(s) relevant to the company.

6. A Recruitment tool for your business

Potential employees can learn about your culture, your policies, your way of interacting with the world, and the process you use for hiring employees through your blog. It is a powerful tool for engaging the people who might want to potentially work for you.

7. Build your personal brand

A business blog allows you the opportunity to put a voice to your brand, and gives you the opportunity to develop and meet customer expectations for your brand.

8. Web Presence

A business blog extends your business’ Web presence. Each new blog post you publish on your business blog becomes another entry point, and with each new entry point comes the potential for more traffic.

For small businesses it is a low-cost alternative to having a web presence. For small business owners without the time to learn web html or the money to hire a designer/developer, blogging offers an inexpensive method to get your company’s name out on the Internet.

9. What’s New Pages

If you add lots of new articles, information, or products regularly, sometimes it can be difficult for your customers to find out what’s new. A quick blog entry can show them what’s updated on your site.

10. What’s Coming

You can use a blog to peak interest in future products or projects. It’s also a great way to keep notes about what you’re planning for your customers, the entries are archived so nothing is lost either for you or your customers. Plus, if your blog tool has a comments feature, you can use that to judge interest before it goes live.