Tag Archives: website

Upgrading some features on my website…

The PolyBlog
March 21 2020

I’m sure my wife saw the post title and started social distancing just for that. “Not again!” was likely her thought. It’s true, I do play with some stuff on the site, often figuring out new ways to do something, and since I’m anal-retentive, I hate the thought of something that leaving previous versions if, say, I find a better way to do book reviews that I would implement starting now.

Simple content areas

Most of my content is relatively straightforward — a blog post here, a blog post there. For each, they are pretty text-heavy even if the popular website wisdom is more graphics and video. That’s not me, I’m a writer, I write words. But there are a few areas where I feel the choices for how to display the text are not quite so clear; for the simple areas, it is relatively, umm, simple.

For astronomy, I share my own pics of course, but I’m also writing an astronomy guide. So having a simplified layout that is easy for anyone to read is important to me. Mostly so far it is only a table of contents and a series of early pages or blog posts. I can do them as either (post or page), really, but most are done as pages.

For my challenges (reading, baking/cooking), they’re relatively simple static pages.

For materials related to government, much of it is simply one-off posts, no real structure required. But then I have two other areas…the first is PS Transitions FP, a report from a conference that a group of students from Carleton organized in 2002, and for which I was the webmaster. It’s entirely static, but it does have some tabbing in it, as well as a photo gallery. I’ve kept the content there for over 18 years, but the methodology for doing so has had to be altered a little bit when plugins expired, or setups on my site changed.

The other area is my HR guide, and it has been a challenge more for organizing than content, at least in terms of the website portion. I have multiple versions of some of the content, with a LOT of comments on pages that I now consider archival. I hesitate to delete them and lose all those comments, but I don’t like having the old versions of the guide there when I’ve written later and better versions. I recently found a plugin that will let me move comments from an old post to my latest post on the same topic, and I’ll likely consolidate it all when I get my latest version of the guide finished. My wife is acting as my editor, so I’m hopeful it will be my best version yet. And then I’ll likely delete all the other content. The thought makes me queasy, to be honest. All those words, used extensively by people, but I’m going to delete entire posts and pages? I haven’t worked through that mentally yet. I might find a way to preserve it somewhere else on the site.

Under personal, I have posts about family and goals, all relatively straight-forward. But the ones for humour and quotes give me pause. I like the idea of sharing both through social media as memes. And then including them on my website. Sounds simple, right? Except if I do it as a meme, i.e. a graphic, then the graphic doesn’t get indexed on my site. Index bots don’t read the “text” within the graphic, it is just the graphic. So if I add a long joke, or even a short quote, and someone was to search anywhere for it, my site wouldn’t show up in the search engine because technically that text doesn’t appear on my site. Yet, by the same token, if I post it as text, it doesn’t look as sharp as a meme, suitable for sharing. Someone suggested including both, but that seems redundant. However, I might have a new way to at least create a searchable list of the description of the meme at least. A bit manual to create at first, but ongoing would be simple to update for future posts.

The more difficult areas to format

The real challenge has always been my reviews. Before I even had a website, I wrote book and movie reviews and just shared them along with jokes to a subscription-based newsletter list. It was free, but you had to “ask” to be on it. I had book reviews, movie reviews, jokes, and an active trivia game at the time. Most of it was in a spreadsheet that handled all my formatting in ASCII format so I could paste into an email and just pressed SEND. It worked, I liked it, and when I created my first PolyWogg website, I wanted to put my reviews there.

Of late, though, I have mostly focused on book reviews. I generally have liked the format for them (plot / premise, what I liked, what I didn’t like, bottom line, rating), and yet I confess it took me several tries to get them looking the way I wanted. One of the early challenges was whether or not I include a “disclosure” phrase in the review on my own website. You’re supposed to declare any conflict-of-interest elements if you post reviews on a lot of commercial sites, and since I share them on those sites too, it seemed simple to also include them on mine. But over time, I realized I didn’t really care. For almost none of them do I have any conflict. I don’t have that many cases where I got a free book / advanced reader copy to read. So the disclosure was bulky and just said that I had no link to the author. Kind of meaningless in the long-run. I cut it.

Then Amazon started playing with how they handle referral links. I didn’t have a lot of links on my site, and so I wasn’t getting any referral money. I think I got about a dollar over five years. But I did have the account, and the main point of having it was so I could link to the Amazon website and hotlink in pictures of the book covers. Yet Amazon booted me from the active referral program along with 1000s of other affiliates who hadn’t earned any commissions in the previous year. They culled the list, so to speak, and I would have cut me too. But that called into question my hotlinking, which also required me to run two extra plugins. Could I get the images some other way? Yep, Good Reads grants permission to those doing reviews to link to the images on their own site. Yes! So I went through probably 150 or so book reviews, reformatting a few things as I went (like cutting disclosure paragraphs) and updating all the images. Tedious, but they were all “fixed” to match the new approach. That was about six months ago.

The part that was “left” was my index of book reviews. I had tried some indexing tools, some table plugins, a few other things, and none of them really worked the way I wanted them to do. Because I had different types of info that I wanted to be able to group by:

  1. Alphabetically by title (obvious);
  2. Alphabetically by author;
  3. The raw review number (i.e., mostly chronologically for me for the order in which I write the reviews);
  4. The date of my review (where #3 failed is some of my reviews are old and I’ve updated them and included them, but that means putting in a 1998 review in between two 2015 reviews, for example, so #3 and #4 are not exactly the same sort);
  5. The year the book was published;
  6. Series and order, to give me the ability to group books in the same series; and,
  7. My rating.

But without the proper tool to display all of that, I organize it manually. I still use a flat-file database in a spreadsheet, Excel currently, although it started off in Lotus 1-2-3 years ago, and in the spreadsheet, I have a field that formats the info so I can simply paste it into my website. For example, I mix and match sub-fields into a single string that says:

TITLE by AUTHOR (BR#####; published {date}; reviewed {date}; series {order}; rating)

I then simply paste that into one page, add a hotlink to the URL for the review post, and then copy that to six other index pages. I have tended to do it in batches of twenty-five book reviews at a time, so I would write 25 reviews and post them over the course of a number of months, and when I got to the 25th, I would then paste all 25 strings into a web-page, add the URLs, and then paste them into the other six pages too. Time-consuming, and doing 25 together made it a bit more efficient on workflows, but it was a workflow blockage too. Plus, once in awhile, I’d mess up some link or a copy and paste, and then a year later, I would happen to notice that the link from one of the indices was not, in fact, linking to the right page. I’d messed it up, and when I beta-tested it, I had apparently missed the errors. REALLY annoying. Another downside to coding some things manually.

As I said, though, I had tried out a bunch of options to put it into various auto-sorting tools, but it never worked well.

An accidental revolution

In addition to my book reviews, I also do movie reviews, music reviews (although mainly only one year so far), and TV reviews. For the TV reviews, it is INCREDIBLY slow to do a review of a full season of TV for me. Which is odd, because the individual episodes are ALREADY reviewed. As I watch TV, I keep track of individual episodes and when I finish the episode, I use a similar spreadsheet to automate a quick TWEET that says:

ShowTitle – S(eason)##E(pisode)## – EpisodeTitle – QuickOneLineReview – RatingOutOfFive

Sooo, I have always wanted to embed those reviews in my website, but didn’t have a good way to do that, at least not quickly. I tried a manual approach:

  • Created a table in a reusable post template;
  • Added a line for the Tweet;
  • Added a line for a picture from the episode (I was saving them for a while);
  • Added some areas to talk about the overall season;
  • Added an area to rate the whole season;

But then I was stuck. That is a LOT of copy and pasting to get it to look right. I tried just pasting from Excel spreadsheets, but the paste is painful — it adds codes to EVERY cell, so if you want to adjust layout later, the whole table is a mess of codes. So I went looking for a way to embed an Excel Spreadsheet into a website easily. Just so I could paste, for example, a whole season’s worth of tweet/reviews at once.

And I found the very popular plugin for WordPress called TablePress. It would allow me to import spreadsheets directly or even to paste them raw. Gave it a try, and BAM, it worked right out of the box. Great, I had a way to paste the whole season at once into a page.

But then I noticed some other features. It would let me search the table too, applying the terms like a filter. Not really needed in a table of only 20-25 rows, but interesting. Oh, and you can sort columns too. Again, I don’t really need that with the episodes.

Or more accurately, I don’t need that function for THIS table. But what about my book review indices? Holy Hannah, I could have ONE table instead of 7 and EVERY FIELD is sortable? Plus I can paste directly from Excel? Holy fudgicles!

Welcome to the revolution

I only had 8 reviews of TV seasons, all for the show Castle that finished a few years ago. Again, as I said, too time-consuming to paste in every episode line by line, particularly if I was also pasting in photos. Meh. Instead, I’ve cut it down to an overview, episodes that I liked, those that were watchable, those that I didn’t like, a table of all the episodes, an overall review of the season, and some links to the index of other reviews.

With each column sortable. I copy the rows and columns from Excel where I already have the info, paste it all into the back end, add one line to my page, and BAM!, instant table. I started thinking, okay, this is good, I’ll do a table for each season, no problem. But then I thought again. Every table will be identical in format. And Castle has 8 seasons, that’s 8 tables to keep in the database with different names, I’ll need a good naming convention, etc. Hmm…but what if I could merge ALL of the Castle episodes into one table and just list those that correspond to Season 1. Is that doable? Turns out it is. TablePress has a premium extension called row filtering. So now I have pasted ALL of the info for each episode for eight seasons of Castle into the same table, and now instead of saying just “show Castle table”, I also say “filter to S01”. Still all one line.

Now I could get really aggressive, and paste all my shows into one database. Dozens of shows, hundreds of seasons, maybe even thousands of episodes and then filter on “Castle” and “S01”. Yet it would generate a HUGE table in the database. If it corrupts, I’m toast, I’ll lose everything, plus it would be loading the whole table each time it ran a filter. For TV episodes at least, I’ll keep it to one table per show. But once I’ve pasted one season in, the rest can go like gangbusters. A huge workflow saving, and it generates the same way every time.

And it got me thinking about how to do the book reviews.

As I mentioned earlier, I had 7 pages of book review indices generated relatively manually. Now they could be all in one page. Great! Except that all of my existing book review pages have a small table at the end of each that has links to each of the seven pages. All nicely formatted; all no longer needed. In 180 book reviews. The ones I updated 6 months ago to fix the problem with showing the pictures of the book covers. Dang it.

Editing Book Reviews

It really isn’t as bad as it sounds, maybe an hour or two of dedicated processing to open the page, go to the bottom, paste a new line that only links to the main index, and then delete the table for the rest. Easily doable. There likely is a way to do this in the block editor to prevent ever having this need again (i.e. perhaps I could edit the block next time and delete or update all of them at once), but I am not a block-editor kind of guy. I vastly prefer the simple classic editor. So that’s what I’ve done. But I went through my layout in detail asking myself if there is ANYTHING else I might want to change as I go. My ratings show as pictures of a frog reading on a lilypad, and if it is four out of five, it shows four green ones and one grey one, for instance. On all of my other reviews, TV / Movies / Music, I’m switching my ratings from an actual graphic file over to a simple icon / emoji of a smiling frog. So four green frogs and one grey circle, for 4/5. It looks simpler, shows up cleaner in tweets and FB, kind of cute. I like the branding. But for my book reviews, I like the graphic of the frog reading. So I am committing to that staying. I’ll use the frog emoji in tables, like above, but for the rest, it is graphics.

While I was playing with this, I also adjusted my movie reviews, even though for that too there are only a handful. Too hard to do the workflow, or so I thought. Now that I have an easily updatable table, it’s not that bad.

My other big tweak

A few months ago, I started the process of switching all of my photos from a separate Piwigo install on my website into a WordPress-based NextGen Gallery that embeds all the photos into the site. The integration is great, but it is a LOT of work to move 13K photos from one server area to another. I’m fixing a whole bunch of stuff on the back end as I go, including how filenames and captions, plus face tagging, are done, and I’m using Mylio as by desktop photo processor along with its built-in facial recognition. That has a small impact on my movie and TV reviews as I do include some photos for those (like the show’s title screen and a pic or two from an episode somewhere in the season). It’s working well, but I’m a bit stalled on the “big” move. Still a LONG way to go on the regular personal photos, not to mention astronomy photos later. Yikes.

Conclusion

And that’s where I am. TablePress as a major change, plus its extension for filtering + I’ve reformatted the entire approach to reviews + I’m using a new gallery plugin on the backend. But I’m really happy with the approach, for the first time in a long time. I feel like there aren’t any niggling elements on any of the review contents, or the others really, where I don’t have the approach I want. No “unresolved” issues like manually having to do multiple index pages rather than having the system generate it for me.

Yay me!

So you want your own website…

The PolyBlog
December 4 2018

Since a lot of friends know I have my own website, it isn’t uncommon to get questions about how they get their own website, dipping their toe in the vast sea of having their own presence online. Usually I frame the discussion around three questions.

A. Do you want your own domain?

This is almost always a no-brainer for people as they often think in very specific terms and have some domain names in mind. My domain, polywogg.ca, is registered to me and only me. It is the same for every company on the planet that has a site, usually. They all register a domain name that is unique to them.

It isn’t the only way to go. Lots of people use free sites at various hosters and end up with sites like “http://AndreasWorld.wordpress.com” or “LoveOfBooks.blogger.com”. Their “unique” presence is still there but the hoster’s name shows up too. For some, they don’t care about that; for most, they do.

If you care about having a site that only has your name in it, you need to register a domain. If you don’t, you can go with lots of hosters that will give you an address like above. Or even trick out a bunch of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Now, the REAL question is more difficult, and for me it’s not a question. I do not and will not register a domain with the same company I choose for my hosting of the site. Let me explain.

When I put my website online, I need two things:

a. A registrar who tells the internet that polywogg.ca is registered to me and also tells all its internet friends where to find my website (the technical numerical address of my site); AND

b. A server of some sort that hosts the files and content for my actual website.

A registrar and a hoster. I need both. And lots of people who are hosters will also offer registrar services. And some registrars have also gotten into hosting. A fully-integrated service, as they pitch it.

Yet there is an inherent conflict of interest for them. Sure, they have to do it all properly and everything, but when you register your domain, it actually records four pieces of information — a registrant ID, a tech ID, an admin ID, and the DOMAIN NAME SERVICE (DNS) address where your website can be founded (like your REAL IP web address that the internet servers use, not the word form users see).

For most people registering a personal site, the DNS will be given to you by your hoster; the admin ID is likely you; and the tech ID may be whoever is helping you set up the website or just you. Regardless of who is doing the registry, these three things are pretty much the same across the board. The problem comes with the REGISTRANT ID.

This basically says who owns that domain. When you do the registry yourself, it should always say you. However, here’s the kicker…sometimes companies that offer cheap registries and hosting packages actually find it easier to just register themselves in that field. They may also register themselves as the tech or admin ID, which is not ideal, but not too problematic, they’re easily changed. But the owner / registrant ID requires the registered ID holder to agree to any changes.

Most people don’t think anything about this. And if you ask the hoster, they’ll tell you there’s no issue. You just move the registry to somewhere else. But unless you have that in writing, why would you simply trust them?

There are countless stories on the web of BADHOSTER X registering a domain “on behalf of” customer Y. Fast forward five years, the person’s needs have changed in what they’re looking for in a website, and they see lovely HOSTER Z sitting over there with exactly what they’re looking for at the right price. No problem, Y will just move from X to Z. And then X says, “Whoa, wait a minute. We want your business. Let us do blah blah blah.” And so they delay and cajole the person into staying. And eventually it turns acrimonious as the person just wants to leave, and BADHOSTER X won’t relinquish their ownership of the domain. They’ll let the DNS address point to another service, but they won’t do it quickly (they serve their own customers first), and what a surprise, they’ll only do it after paying an admin fee. If you’re Mr. or Ms. Big and Popular site, sometimes they’ll say, “Oh, look at our sliding scale…we’ve been discounting, so now you have to pay our full admin fee based on usage, and oh look, they want $1000 to transfer your domain.” It’s extortion, pure and simple, and yes, it is indeed illegal.

Is this a frequent problem? No. Is it a possible problem? Absolutely. They also might just jack the rates after year 1 for your renewals (you have to pay a yearly fee to keep the domain registered to you).

When I went to register my domain, all the experts said “do it separately”, it’s just less risk of future hassle, and while a bit more manual, not egregiously so. And I did. I found Canadian Domain Name Services in Canada, registered all three of my domain names with them over time, and that’s the only service I do with them. They now offer hosting too, but I don’t need that. I just need the basic service I signed up with them for, and it works perfectly. No muss, no fuss, no extortionary practices if I decide to move my website hosting. Which, by the way, I have done four times in my website’s life. Just deciding that the previous hosting wasn’t what I wanted. Three clicks later (almost), and I was with someone else’s hosting package, so I just closed the previous one. And if any of the hosters gave me a hard time, I didn’t care — I just went to the registrar and pointed away from that hoster to my new hoster, leaving me with an up and running site. By contrast, if I was in dispute with my old hoster, they could literally hold me and my website hostage if they were also my registrar.

And yes, ALL the current hosters will offer you deals on your initial registry to get you to join, and almost ALL of them will register themselves as the owner of the domain. You decide if you want to trust them with that part of your site.

In the end, the question is easily answered by a simple metaphor…if you paid a lawyer to register your business, would you let them register themselves as the owner?

B. Do you want a dynamic site or a static site?

If you read any web design advice on the web, they’ll tell you that static sites are the worst possible thing to do. But they mean something different than what this question means.

What they mean is that sites need updates and new content in order to generate buzz and traffic. New things to encourage people to visit your site regularly. What they mean is “dynamic content”.

In my case though, I mean two things — is there going to be dynamic content (as per above) and are you going to want to change the look and feel, menus, etc. on the site over time?

If all you want is a relatively static site — both for content and design — then there are lots of simple hosters out there that offer HTML-based websites (simple web pages) with slick looking templates. You go to their site, sign up for a hosting package, choose a template, and voila, your site is designed. You add your info, some pics and graphics, and you’re done. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.

GoDaddy used to be the biggest player on the block for this. Then companies like WIX came along. They’re cheap, they’re slick, it all works pretty well. The only thing you’ll have to do is provide your credit card, click some buttons, and then go tell your registry whatever info the hoster tells you to enter (it’ll basically be something like “Your DNS entry is AndreasWorld.wix1.com” and you’ll go enter that in the registrar site — it’s basically like telling the post office where you live).

There are GREAT sites and templates available. Prices can be as low as $5/month or even lower if you pay by the year. So why wouldn’t everyone use it? Because it isn’t easy to modify the template. If you decide you don’t like the colour of the lines on a table? Well, good luck changing it. Maybe it’s easy, likely it’s not. Some features aren’t even available to be edited, regardless of your technical ability, unless you’re a pro.

Cheap, easy, fast, and relatively professional looking. But it’s not easy to update regularly (nor change the design).

Others, by contrast, want to basically add new content every day. A story. A photo. A post. A new page. Random thoughts. If this is what you are after OR you will be mostly static but with lots of sub-pages, then another solution is better. Officially it’s called a CMS — content management system.

The most common CMS available are blogging platforms aka blogs or gallery platforms aka photo galleries. If you’ll be mostly posting text, you want a blogger; if you are mostly posting photos, you might want a gallery. And of course, just to be confusing, most galleries allow you to have blog-like posts and most blogs also offer galleries. But if you’re mostly text, go with the blog.

There are two main blogging platforms that are like Wix or GoDaddy — already available blogging setups ready to go. One is called blogger.com, and the other is WordPress. Blogger is entirely a self-contained site, you can host your site with them (with your own domain, just like Wiz) and have a bunch of templates to choose from. Click, click, click, you’re good to go. A little basic in their offerings, but you can be blogging in minutes. Literally.

WordPress took a different approach. Yes, they offer both free and paid online accounts (as does Blogger), and the more you pay, the more power you have. Even the most basic site though is more powerful than the free site (and you can have your own domain as opposed to polywogg.wordpress.com). Like Blogger, you can be up and running in minutes, but there is more power under the hood, so it can be a bit more daunting.

The alternative approach they took though is that they ALSO offer their software as a full download and you can run it on other hosting platforms i.e. I am registered with a company called Web Hosting Canada, and can install WordPress to run on it. There are competitors out there too — Moodle, Joomla, Drupal, etc. Actually dozens, if not hundreds. But WordPress is the biggest player.

Running your own “install” of WordPress might sound daunting, and it is at first. But there aren’t that many menus under the hood, and they are relatively intuitive after you finish with setup. Plus there are thousands of templates available to tweak to your heart’s content.

Definitely more work, but the payoff is that a blog is inherently dynamic. Write a new article, post it, and BAM, instant dynamic content. If you don’t plan to do that, then stick with a static site.

C. What else do you want on the site?

After you get through the basics of a static or dynamic page above, you should be leaning one way or the other. Now I need to make your life more complicated. What else do you want on the site?

Do you want a guestbook? If you do, it is easier to do and control with a dynamic site (after all, static sites don’t inherently let you make simple updates like adding your name to the page).

Do you want a catalog of products that might change? If it’s a few services or products and they are relatively the same all the time, maybe just price changes, you can go with a static site. If you want a lot of products listed (almost like a gallery), you need a dynamic site.

Do you want sidebars, banners, advertising, changing menus, galleries, calendars? All argue for a dynamic site. The more “custom” you need it, the less the basic static sites are going to meet your needs.

What am I not telling you?

If you are going to hire someone to do the design for you, none of the above may matter. If they are good, they’ll set you up with a solution that meets your needs today and tomorrow. Of course, there may be a small conflict of interest in their advice in that they may get more money out of you if you redesign later.

So, in short:

  • Simple site, not much change in content, few pages, basic web presence — go with static site;
  • Changing content, multiple pages, regular updates, evergreen web presence — go with dynamic site like WordPress.

At least those are the basics.

Oh, well, I was doing well on online guides until this one.

The PolyBlog
May 12 2018

I’ve had some decent success in recent days with reading online ebook guides from websites, and Vanilla Forums has one called Gamification for Online Communities. I’m not even going to bother linking to it as it doesn’t deserve the promotion.

I confess I have a small hidden agenda in reading it — I’m curious if they know what gaming is to start with or if they just decide it’s too obvious to define. The MOOC course studying games showed that isn’t an irrelevant question (Understanding Video Games – Week 7 – The culture of video games).

It starts off strong — a definition rooted in the academic study and scientific classification, namely that gamification is the “use of game thinking and game design elements in non-game contexts. These game mechanics are designed to shape a game’s dynamics (e.g., competitive behaviour) and emotions (e.g., anticipation) in order to engage players (e.g. users, customers, employees, voters).” It focuses on the application aspects to other areas and even goes further with a larger formal definition that recognizes point-scoring and rules as key elements. For the onboarding process, it uses examples about tracking completion progress and achievements, but doesn’t initially mention the need for “rewards” for those behaviours — without the reward, it’s just a to-do list.

After that, it moves into the aspects but I found the motivation elements less revealing. They talk about player types, and only identify 3, and then moves on to benefits of gamification. Except it doesn’t identify any. It says “let’s talk about what it can’t do”, and then doesn’t. It is completely empty fluff statements. It shifts gears into “how to implement gamification”, but really only jumps to some key performance indicators (KPIs) to know if people are using the site before and after you implement it.

At this point, I would be willing to toss the entire thing, but it’s only 33 pages so I kept going. The section on onboarding isn’t bad, pretty simplistic view, but okay. Another section talks about engagement, hopefully leading to entrenchment, before moving on to potential pitfalls.

Overall, I’d probably rate it about a 3/10 for content. But if you take into account typos, grammatical mistakes, and just plain spelling errors, I’ll downgrade to a 1/10.

Too bad, it started so strongly on the definition.

An ebook guide to WordPress plugins worth reading

The PolyBlog
May 12 2018

I recently loved WP-Engine’s guide with Torque called “The Ultimate Pre-Launch Checklist for WordPress Websites“. So when they sent me a link for The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Plugins, I was intrigued enough to click-through, sign up, get the ebook and start reading.

As with the Checklist, it is divided into multiple simple sections:

Marketing — Instagram, SEO, and Sitemap plugins were standard fare, but they also added lead generation, and contest plugins, most of which I would never use but I’ve also never even thought of them as categories that WP had in their repository.

Development and Design — Child themes, sliders, forms, and lightbox plugins are all standard fare, a good collection. I would have expected a bit more “getting started” plugins before those, but good choices. Typography and shortcode plugins though are really good additions, even if they are more “level 2 or 3” for people new to WordPress.

Monetization — I am not very interested in this area, but I liked they added simple things like PayPal integration, crowdfunding, and e-commerce in general, not just ad systems and affiliate links.

Media Plugins — I was really curious to see what they had listed, particularly just after I did my pic and video integration project. They have audio (not interested), graphs and charts (simple choices, but good), and two video plugins. Not awesome.

Customer Experience — Adding a knowledge base to your own site? I didn’t realize you could do that with a separate plugin, but okay. Translation plugins? Those are giant flags for me as automated translation is often a crapshoot. Live chat plugins, okay. Ratings plugins? Well, that’s a bit different to see. I don’t normally see those covered. And tooltips, whatever.

Security — basic security plugins and role managers? Hmm. I guess since the security packages tend to be all-in-one, I guess that makes sense. I was expecting a suite of smaller functional plugins.

Business Improvements — booking and calendar functions, looks decent. Could put that with customer experience though. Same with directory plugins. Invoice plugins…wouldn’t that go with your e-commerce area? Project management plugins…hmm, now there’s a question if that warrants it’s own item from the rest. Although it gets close to “running the business” to me, kind of like monetization too.

Site optimization — Often these look like snake-oil salespersons, but at least the ones mentioned are reputable. Don’t now how much good they do outside of large business sites. There’s also responsive design, mobile compatibility, etc.

And then the ubiquitous “other” category. But what a category. Plugins to embed games; holiday related plugins; map tools; real estate plugins — wait, what? that’s pretty specific; and comment plugins — why isn’t that with forms and ratings?

A pretty good list overall, and worth my time, even if a bit uneven in places and not as good as the previous guide they shared. I’ll double-check my game and wordsite options, good flags for me.

A website guide worth reading

The PolyBlog
May 12 2018

If you’re reading this, you know that I have a website (the server waves “hello”, by the way). It’s just a personal site, but I’m closing in on a million words worth of posts, so that alone puts me above a number of personal sites out there where people blog for a while and then stop. Plus I’m a bit of a planner, so I approach my site a bit more formally than the “creative” types. (Also explains why it has such a boring layout but that’s another story!). Which quite often means that if I see guides and things designed for businesses that can be applied to my site too, I click, read them, and go to sleep hunting for acorns of truth in a sea of spam and superlatives.

So imagine my surprise when I click on one and find that I LOVE IT.

An organization called WP-Engine wrote “The Ultimate Pre-Launch Checklist for WordPress Websites“ and I thought it was interesting enough to click-through. Sure, I had to surrender my email and look like a business, which I am a bit, and then I got the e-guide. They have it broken down into several headings and I’m going to talk about each one.

Content — replacing dummy content (words, images, video, audio), and proofreading and formatting, and a contact page are standard, but I like the rest of the suggestions for reviewing — page links, downloadable files, 404 error pages (rarely done, mine is pretty minimal), and redirections (from old sites), which a LOT of people don’t do.

Design — I was surprised at this one, as I thought they were mostly going to talk about layouts and themes, but instead they were more on the technical (HTML and CSS validation, optimizing images, FavICONs, and linking header images) and usability testing (previewing in different browsers and platforms, including mobile). However, I didn’t even know you could set up a Print Stylesheet (I tend to just use PrintFriendly) and this may be something to look into as I would like to be able to quickly convert some of the posts into downloadable / printable sheets or PDF.

Functionality — This one looks more like simple usability testing to me, with web forms, auto responders, speeds, social media, RSS, and third-party tools. However, I really like their inclusion of “accessibility guidelines”. Often missed.

SEO — I really hate stuff written about Search Engine Optimization, normally at least. Almost all of it is “I can put your site at the top of the Google results list!” Actually nobody can do that. Not without bot farms and a bunch of shady methods. Real SEO is not about having the perfect design, it’s about content. Always has been, always will be. If you’re a company selling widgets, unless that widget is unique to you, the only way you’re going to the top of the list is if people like your product and search for it or click on links that link to you. An optimized site with crappy products won’t do anything compared to an okay site with great products. The guide has all the basics of meta data, titles, taglines, keywords, and add a site map. It’s a good list, I just wished it focused on the content more…for me, it is more like “don’t forget simple things you can do to avoid missed opportunities”. But it’s not presented egregiously, just one more thing to do.

Marketing — Ruh roh, my alarm bells started ringing. Web marketing tends to be like the classic line about advertising — 50% doesn’t work, we just don’t know which 50%. Except in web marketing, it is likely closer to 90% doesn’t work. And honestly, most of the materials on the net are “Oh, you want to do web marketing? Here’s my tool at $x per month that will make it EASY to GET THE BEST RESULTS on the PLANET, maybe EVEN THE UNIVERSE”. This guide? Nope, it just mentions newsletters, email providers, social icons, and social profiles. Nice.

Legal — Up until this point, I would say the guide is clearly in the top ten of all the ones I have ever seen. Then they do a section on Legal? Nobody does that. NOBODY. Seriously, I’ve never seen it even remotely mentioned in any guide. And I don’t just mean put a copyright notice. They talk about showing the company details — trustworthiness, efficacy, sure, but also mandatory for some jurisdictions, along with tax registration. Ensuring you have all the required licenses for images, fonts, code, plugins? Nobody tells companies to review that! Privacy policies are de rigueur now, so no surprise to include it. Terms and Conditions are good, although I saw a post this week about the readability of them and running it through a barometer of how dense it is. Even cookie warnings and local requirements are mentioned. Awesome. Way beyond anything one needs to do on a personal site, sure, but awesome.

The rest of the guide is equally awesome. Moving the site to a new server, preparing for launch, backup and security, and then the launch. All with decent steps covering the big-ticket items. It even concludes with a bunch of cleanup organizational items.

But if you’re not convinced by my descriptions above, here’s the kicker…wherever there is a popular related plugin in the WordPress repository, they say, “You could use x or y to do this for you.” If you go off and do that, they don’t get a royalty or anything. There’s no click-through to do that. It is just them mentioning it. And most of their recommendations are relatively obvious ones, but it’s what everyone is using. They’re not saying, “Here, try this little plugin that one of our members developed.”

It’s just a great guide. You may have to surrender your email and get a marketing offer for the company to see if you want to hire a WP expert, but the content is awesome.