This weekend was the WordCamp that almost wasn’t. Due to a recent storm Hurricane Matthew that brushed all along the east coast of Florida that not only caused moderate damage to coastal property but cancelled many events and conferences that only happen once a year here. So a special shout-out goes to Lisa Melegari and the rest of WordPress Orlando Team for being nimble and dedicated to get this conference rescheduled with a pretty quick turnaround and still keep the same venue, sponsors, and amenities.
Some quick highlights of the weekend for us first that our own resident Social Media Marketing Strategist Nicole Perpillant did a talk on Facebook Integrations. This was a great talk for small businesses and entrepreneurs looking to use social media ads in spaces like Facebook and Instagram and ways to hone in on your target market and audience.
This year’s theme was on Lego’s and it was awesome. Probably brought out the kid in all of us. Thankfully there weren’t too many toys out for give-a-ways because I know most of us would have been building and playing instead of networking and learning. Both days were filled with speakers, talks, and panels anywhere from How to install WordPress, to Security best practices, Child Themes, and PHP Functionality. You can see the full schedule along with the speaker talks and information at this link.
While I will be posting the photos we took while on site for the weekend soon, know that it was a pleasure to talk and meet with so many new people. One of the things that is the same with each different WordCamp that we attend is the chance of meeting people who actually aren’t from your local area.
One of the biggest take-aways for me will actually be better explained in a coming blog post about your website being “Software”. There was a Panel Discussion and this was mentioned by one of the speakers Karena Kreger when she referenced WordPress as a software and it really resonated with me because while I know that it is, I don’t treat it like that. Let me explain; to me WordPress is a CMS (Content Management System) and kind of ecosystem. Being that it’s a hub that has extensions of functionality driven by other pieces to make a website work in a way intended by a developer for the end-user experience. Ok before I lose you, let me explain. See in the tech-bubble that most of us designers and developers live in, we understand how to WordPress lives in the sense of what makes it work, the vulnerabilities that it can be susceptible to, and how fragile it can be to core editing. But our clients and customers and users don’t know or understand all of that. In my mind I created a metaphor to best explain this; if you were to explain to a client of whom you are developing or created a WordPress website for, you’d have to tell them it is like having Windows 10 and that in order to keep it working well – there will need to be periodic updates. And along with those updates there will also need to be safety and security measures (and additional software) in place to keep “your software” working well. If ignored you can start to notice decreased performance among many other things.
Some of the best speakers like Josh Pollack, Scott Mann, Jeff Noel, and Elizabeth Pampalone (to name just a few) did great with metaphors. They were able to take what they’ve experienced and word it in a way that we could consume and reflect on. Like any good conference you should never walk away without your head filled with ideas, have some solutions to problems you’ve been dealing with, or a sense of empowerment that you too can be a hero like these presenters.
I look forward to reading other blog posts of other people’s experience with WordCamp Orlando in the coming days and weeks. And I’ll also see about accepting the challenge to attend WordCamp US in Philadelphia PA on December 2nd.
If you’re like me, you’re almost always on your smartphone or have your device in a close reach. It’s not because I want to look busy all the time, but that there are a lot of things that are happening online from social media posts, website metrics, responses to blog posts, and content creation to name a few.
I came across this post from WPMU Dev that highlights quite a few of the apps and tools I use as well as a bunch more including:
Recently I was honored to be a speaker at WordCamp Tampa and FLBLOGCON and my talk was about Managed Hosting. We at Design Theory have been providing this service to our clients for the past few years where we take care of backups, updates, security and more so that our clients can focus on their website content and businesses without worry.
While there are many questions out there regarding hosting at a basic level and the validity or need of an enhanced hosting platform like managed hosting is why I decided to make this talk. Below are the slides from my talks that you can view, download, and share. If you have any questions please feel free to contact us!
In this short video you will see how quick and easy it is to create a new blog post. You’ll want to log into your Dashboard in order to see the menu options on the left and continue from this video.
If your website is built using WordPress, you’re probably going to want to get it indexed for Google in the best way possible. Using the Yoast SEO plugin will help you do just that and some more. It’s one of the leading SEO plugins for WordPress websites and widely used. In this video we discuss common questions people have about the plugin as well as best practices.
It’s been about four years now that we’ve been working exclusively in WordPress when building websites for clients. We switched over to it as a test with some websites that needed the ability to make content updates on a regular basis, then found it to be so much more resourceful than how we were building our regular HTML websites. And now WordPress sites take up about 26% of websites built on the internet. Pretty cool right?!
For those of you using WordPress though will want to make sure you’re always using the latest version of the platform. There are a few quick reasons why:
New Functions and Features – With the version updates usually brings new functionality that makes the commonly used tools and options even easier for content creators. Image galleries are easier than ever before, content formatting is better, and so are the themes.
Security and Patches – Typically you’ll see these in the incremental updates to the versions, but these are always important to pay attention to. Because WordPress is open sourced and community driven, input from users of the platform are actually taken into account when issues are found. Yes even the small little hiccups matter to the developers because they’re able to track and culminate all of that data and package fixes that are then pushed through these updates for all to enjoy.
What does this all mean? Don’t neglect your website. You may be one of the many owners that have several pending updates waiting for you to take action. Before you make those updates, be sure to read what is changing. It helps to understand this because there could be a reason why you shouldn’t update or possible test to see first if the updates will be compatible with your current theme, plugins, and custom settings.
You’ll want to check with your web consultant if you’re not sure, or you can always contact us and we can help with that too. Probably one of the more important things is to be sure and make a backup of your website prior to doing any updates. This could help in case something goes wrong or breaks, and then instead of troubleshooting, you can just restore a backup and then work out a plan for how to move forward.
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