WordPress :: TechBasedMarketing

Did You Just Buy A Half-Baked WordPress Plugin?

By Lynette · Comments (0)

Wednesday, March 20th, 2013

Fair warning. While this post is meant to be informative for you, it is also a little bit of a rant. Years ago, I somehow came across a marketer who had a fairly large stable of WordPress plugins. It came across that plugins were his business and all he really did at that time were plugins. Being also in this business, I’m always on the look out for people of like minds not just for market research but to see if there were opportunities to work together. So I joined the list. One day, he pushed out a super interesting plugin. It was something I wanted to create myself but he beat me to the punch. But you know, that’s OK because there’s always something called an affiliate program and what better way to earn and not having to spend time building on my own right? So I bought the plugin. It was unbelievably cheap, something like $7. The plugin looked fabulous with its beautiful graphics, nicely designed admin interface. So yeah, I’m a sucker for great user interface or in geek speak UI. You can witness my obsession on Pinterest. It really looked like a plugin I could wholeheartedly recommend. Until I installed

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Plugins To Easily Find & Insert Stunning Photos For Your Blog

By Lynette · Comments (7)

Tuesday, December 11th, 2012

Have you ever written a post quickly but spent more time finding and posting the photos? Yeah. That kinda sucks but photos do make your posts more interesting and in many cases, amplify its meaning. While the Grab & Save plugin has been mentioned before as one plugin I absolutely adore because it shaves so much time off the photo insertion process. There’s still room for improvement. For one, I’ve often wished the photo finding, import and insertion process can be done in one go from WordPress without having to copy URLs nor open multiple browsers. Were there other options? As always, WordPress – with its diverse, active and smart group of users and developers – doesn’t disappoint. Here are a few of them. Microstock Photo I really liked how this one functions. When you save your post and enter some tags, the plugin automatically searched iStockPhoto or Fotolia for relevant images. You can also do a manual search. If you configured the plugin to connect to these two stock photo sites, you can also purchase the photo and have it downloaded from your post page itself. Even better, you can configure it to invite people to purchase the image

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Prepare Your Widgets Before Switching WordPress Themes

By Lynette

Wednesday, November 21st, 2012

This week, I’m working on a new theme for one of our sites that have been using the same theme since 2008. Definitely time for a change. It’s not just a fresh design. I’m actually changing themes to Builder so I can have a radically different design on some pages and they must be responsive. Why? Let’s just say it has to do with an app I’m building Anyhow, a lot of themes now make heavy use of widgets and frankly I love it. Widgets are the best things because they make updating small portions of a site so easy. The problem with widgets is, not all of them carry over well to the new design. I’m not talking about sidebars those stay the same for the most part but in my designs, I use widgets to display member only links/content, on home pages and landing pages. Most times these widgets are created to fit the design. Thankfully, WordPress allows you to create your widgets ahead of time. Here’s what I did. Before loading the new theme, drag the widgets I’d need to use/create from the Available into the Inactive Widgets panel. Then, simply copy/paste your content, or configure your widgets

Prevent Selected WordPress Content From Appearing In Search Results

By Lynette

Tuesday, October 16th, 2012

Do this quick test on your WordPress site. Go to your site’s search box and enter a key phrase that you think is likely to pull up results of pages that aren’t meant for public consumption. For example, on this site, we give away the 180 Free Tools List. So I’d want to search for “180 free tools” on my site. Check your search results. Are your download pages showing up and more important – are they accessible? Here’s another test. Searching your site again, enter some random keyword that will produce no results. For example, I typed “Veggie Tales” into my site. Something I know has never been written about on this site. Now, look at the page. What you should expect is a message informing people there were no results. If that’s the only thing on the no results page, great! However, some themes also display links to categories, archives and may even suggest results or list posts from a certain category. Do these friendly suggestions include the download pages to your products or freebies? If so you’d want to fix that. So far, I like the Simply Exclude plugin. Not only does it have quite a number of options

Easy Way To Make Your Content ‘Pop’

By Lynette

Tuesday, October 9th, 2012

Have you noticed how some people’s blog posts just seem to be more visually appealing than others? I know I do and that’s why I always try to add visual elements to emphasize my points, highlight key areas or just make it overall more readable and scan-able. There are several ways to do this. Shorter paragraphs, more white space and easier writing is a great start. Next, bullet points can be jazzed up a little with nice graphical bullets. If you use WordPress, most themes already have a bullet design coded in to work nicely with the rest of the theme and for the most part, common blog posts this will work. Sometimes, you may want to differentiate two lists on the same posts. That’s when two different graphical bullets can help clarify the differences visually. Another thing you can do is to add boxes. The most common boxes we see are testimonials but you can always use boxes or the illusion of boxes to highlight a quote or to feature clips of your content. Similar to boxes, shading or highlight parts of your content with color like alerts or notices commonly seen on may sites can help feature some

The Top Question To Ask When Buying WordPress Plugins

By Lynette

Friday, September 14th, 2012

With the popularity of WordPress, plugins (and themes) are big money. However, let’s not beat around the bush. Big money also tends to attract some not so great sellers. Now, don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing I despise more than painting with a wide brush. In any industry there are always commendable leaders and smaller yet honestly good sellers whom we should all do business with again and again. On the flip side there will always be the bad apples. So, when laying down our hard earned money for WordPress plugins, how do we figure out who exactly we are buying from and who deserves our business again and again? Watch Their History There’s nothing more telling than that. Just because a seller is consistently pushing out plugins does not always make them a good plugin vendor. What you should be looking out for is How often do they go back to update, fix and improve upon their older plugins? There are many vendors who sell one new must-have-it-or-fail plugin after another. If you take a good look at the old plugins they used to put out, they are hardly heard of after the initial launch. Sometimes, you can’t even

Site Security – Don’t Overlook The Obvious

By Lynette

Thursday, August 16th, 2012

After the highly publicized hacking of Wired reporter Mat Honan’s identity, it is clear to me that hackers don’t always go about things they way we think they do. When we hear “I’ve been hacked”, we immediately think someone has been trying to crack our passwords using software that tries all sorts of passwords in the dictionary or based on whatever complex algorithm. Or maybe we think they install something malicious on our computer to spy on us. Yet, Honan’s experience shows us that hackers don’t always need to do all that stuff. In fact, all they did was cleverly and logically work their way through various systems. They call it social engineering. Whatever the name, it’s not good. Keep Your Security Processes But Keep Your Eyes Open Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying abandon your difficult to guess passwords that include caps, characters and numbers. Or don’t use tools to help you secure your personal accounts and business systems. Not at all. It would be foolish of you to. What I’m saying is, sometimes, sit back and take a moment to review if some loops need to be closed. How I Cracked A WordPress Admin Account Just this

Hiding or Removing Options on Post and Page Screen

By Lynette

Thursday, July 26th, 2012

Week before last, I shared a how you can hide certain menu links in WordPress from some clients’ users so they won’t get confused with all the options. Sometimes, that alone is not enough because there are areas on the post and edit screens itself you’d like to hide. This is how you’d get that done. Screen Options This is the easiest way. It doesn’t require any coding at all. Simply log on as the user you’d like to hide the elements from, go Add New post or edit an existing post. Click on the Screen Options tab to drop the panel. Uncheck the items you want to hide. Pretty much every screen in WordPress has Screen Options some screens don’t have much to them to customize. However, you’ll want to check under Menus, Media Library, Links and Pages. The bad: It’s not a safe locking mechanism. If your user eventually clicks on the Screen Options drop down, they can learn to re-enable these options. Chances of that happening depends on how technically adventurous they are. I’d say it is low unless you show them how. Even most seasoned WordPress users tend to ignore Screen Options. It’s not something that’s

Selectively Hide WordPress Admin Menu Items

By Lynette

Friday, July 13th, 2012

When you are working with clients, there’s a great chance they aren’t very WordPress savvy and really, many of them don’t want to know the ins and outs of the system – well, not too much anyway. They just want to know enough to do what they have to do and get out of there. The down side is, when you give someone an account inside their WordPress site, the options in the menu can be overwhelming. Like everything WordPress, this can be easily changed. First, Set Your Role Before doing anything drastic and go applying all sorts of plugins (it’s tempting, I know), give your user a role. It really depends how much control you want to give the client. Usually, if I feel the client is pretty net savvy and has some initiative, I’d allow them admin role. Otherwise, the max I’d give them is Editor. Check out the screen shots below to see what each role (other than admin) gets in their menu. Editor Author Contributor Subscriber If those are sufficient for you, then you’ll have no need to anything else. The problem is, life isn’t always so simple. Add a few plugins the customer has to

OIO Publisher Makes Selling Ads On WordPress Sites A Breeze

By Lynette

Thursday, July 5th, 2012

Looking for an easy, hands free plugin to sell ads on your blog? So were we, and we had some strict requirements. Mustn’t be an ad network e.g. Blogads, BuySellAds etc, nor a script we have to install and maintain (like OpenX) Must be able to take payments Ad buyers should be able to upload their own ads and view stats Ability to display different types of ads As hands free as possible. In short, all we want to do is define the ad spaces and types, put up the page and approve them as orders come in. All disabling of ads etc should be automatic At first it seems like a tall order for a plugin. Most systems that do all that and then some are standalone systems. There are tons of plugins that claim to do some of these but none fit every single requirement and did it well. Then, I found OIO Publisher. Apparently, this plugin has been around for a pretty long time – how did I ever miss it? At first, I was skeptical. Having seen many different plugins at different price ranges its price of $47 seemed rather small compared to everything that is supposedly

Did You Just Buy A Half-Baked WordPress Plugin?

Plugins To Easily Find & Insert Stunning Photos For Your Blog

Prepare Your Widgets Before Switching WordPress Themes

Prevent Selected WordPress Content From Appearing In Search Results

Easy Way To Make Your Content ‘Pop’

The Top Question To Ask When Buying WordPress Plugins

Site Security – Don’t Overlook The Obvious

Hiding or Removing Options on Post and Page Screen

Selectively Hide WordPress Admin Menu Items

OIO Publisher Makes Selling Ads On WordPress Sites A Breeze

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