Archive for Wordpress

Dealing With Spam Comments

no-spamIf you use the blog of your site for a newsfeed, or even just as a blog, you will get spam comments.  Here’s how to best deal with them.

Of course, you can eliminate spam comments by turning off the comments on your posts.  To do this on your WordPress site, look on the left menu of the admin dashboard under Settings for Discussion.  Under “Default Article Settings”, uncheck the box “Allow people to post comments on new articles”.

But leaving comments turned on can generate some conversation about your posts, which is a good thing.  We advise leaving our default setting that before a comment appears on your site, that “Comment author must have a previously approved comment”.   This means that the first time a commenter writes a comment, a notification will go to the post author (by default in WP this is set to the site administrators, but in ACWP, we notify post authors) to approve.  After that, comments from that person (identified by their email address) will appear without needing approval.

You can lock down comments a little tighter by requiring that all comments must be “moderated” or manually approved before they appear on the site.

All our ACWP sites use Akismet, a spam filter for blog comments.  It catches quite a large percentage of spam comments.  But sometimes, you’ll get a notice asking for you to approve a comment that is clearly spam.  Your post was about your church’s upcoming pancake breakfast, and the comment thanks you for all your pointers regarding buying used cars.

You might be tempted to just delete (“trash”) this comment, but it’s important to instead mark this comment as spam.  Akismet is a dynamic filter, and can “learn” to better identify spam comments when you mark the comments that escaped its filter as spam.

We are discovering that on our church sites we occasionally get comments that seem “too personal” to be approved– not inappropriate, but things that should probably get handled through more private email channels, not out in public on the website.   Like someone requesting a refund on an event ticket…

All in all, what we really see is that there aren’t really very many comments at all on the blog-as-a-newsfeed type posts.

What is your experience with blog comments?

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Using Headings in WordPress

Headings in WPYou may have noticed a drop down in the bottom row of the WordPress toolbar that will allow you to quickly change the fonts in your page or post. (It’s displayed in the picture in this post.)

You should not use the Headings to change your font size simply to emphasize text. Heading 1 down through Heading 6 are used to change the font size (and perhaps the font colors, or even the fonts themselves), but their usage should be reserved for actual headings.

Search engines use your headings to index the structure and content of your web pages. It is important to use headings to show the structure of the content on your page or post. Heading 1 is for the most important heading, Heading 6 is for the least important heading.

Users skim your pages by its headings too.  Using headings helps your users move intuitively through your content.  They won’t be able to do this if you make entire blocks of content display as headings.

When you need to emphasize text, use bold or italics. Never use underline for emphasizing text on the web–your users will mistake it for a link.

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Posts and Pages in WordPress

wpNew WordPress users are often confused by the difference between “pages” and “posts”. This is understandable, because the page- and post-editors look very similar. Here are some differences between them:

The posts of your site are the individual “articles” making up the blog in your site. (Remember that in ACWP, we often call your blog the “News Feed”.) The posts are displayed within the reverse-chronological structure of the blog, with the newest posts appearing on the top. By their very nature, posts are designed for dated content.

The pages of your site are outside the blog structure. On a blogging site, the pages would be very few, and be static information, like a biography of the blogger. The information on pages is not going to change much over time.

Use pages for the information about your organization that will not be changing week-to-week or month-to-month.

Use posts for date-based information and information that will become “old news” over the next few weeks.

For most of the churches and organizations that we work with, this means they are creating pages as they are setting up their website (Home page, About, Worship, etc.), and after their website launches, they mostly focus on creating posts.

There are a couple of other differences between pages and posts that might be helpful:

  • Posts can have “categories” and “tags” apply to them, which can be helpful for sorting your posts, or helping users of your site to find similar posts or topics. Pages cannot have categories or tags applied to them.
  • Pages can be organized in hierarchical ways. That is, using your menu, you can create sub-pages, and even sub-sub-pages. In general, faith community websites only develop this level of complexity when they are very large, and have many programs and ministries. Posts cannot be organized in a hierarchical manner.
  • Posts (and not pages) are what is included in the RSS feed from your site. The RSS feed from your site can be utilized in a number of helpful ways, including making automatic Facebook posts – but utilizing this only works with posts.
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Minimize Inline HTML in WordPress

htmlWordPress makes it easy to manage content on a website without knowing code.  But if you know HTML/CSS, it isn’t the best idea to do a lot of inline code that overrides the theme.  Occasionally, a bit of margin here or there is fine, but we discourage extensively using inline HTML/CSS to override the theme.

Here’s why:

  • Depending on how this HTML/CSS is used, it holds the potential to slow your page delivery down, hurting your search engine optimization.  First your theme’s CSS loads, telling it to give every paragraph a 10 pixel margin on the left, then your inline HTML loads, with a command in every paragraph for a 15 pixel margin on the left. This additional code takes a tiny fraction of a second, but if you start multiplying that extensively on every page, it can certainly start to add up.
  • If you are planning to update the look of your site with a new theme (actually, I should say when, since it will almost certainly happen at some point in the future), it’s highly probable that someone will then have to go in and undo all of that in-line HTML/CSS to make the new theme display properly.  Rule of thumb: try not to create future work for future web managers.
  • The focus of our ACWP program is helping people without a lot of tech skills be able to manage their own sites. We’ve learned the hard way that it is infinitely preferable to not create hurdles for lower-tech folks to manage content. If you do a lot of in-line HTML/CSS, you may be the only person who can make changes without creating problems in display.  We always want to be planning ahead for a “hit by the bus” scenario – if you are suddenly unable to make changes to the site (for instance, through illness or travel), we want to have done the small things ahead of time that will enable others to make changes without making a mess.

(Note: We’ve had two separate clients where someone with HTML/CSS knowledge created a lot of in-line overwriting of the WP theme, and when that person needed to stop working on the website, the organization had to call us to “fix it” so that all that in-line code didn’t keep messing up what the new web manager was trying to do through the visual editor.)

Even people without code knowledge can inadvertently create these problems. Most frequently, we see this when web managers get carried away with changing font colors. Every time you change the font color, it creates inline HTML.  Instead of using inline font colors to emphasize text, try these suggestions.

Best practice: as much as practically possible, you want to rely on the WordPress theme to control the display and look of your site.

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What is WordPress?

wpWordPress (WP) is a free, open-source content management system for websites.  Using a web-based interface, WordPress makes creating and maintaining websites extremely easy.  If you can run Microsoft Office apps, you can run WordPress!

WP isn’t resident on your computer like traditional software– it’s installed “in the cloud”, on our server.  You access it through the web with a browser.

We set up your site for you, and then you can manage your site from any computer with an internet connection.  You can even manage your site from your smart phone! (The small screen makes this hard, however, so that’s not an easy everyday access.)

“Content management systems” like WordPress work a little differently than traditional-style websites.  If you’ve worked with a website before, you may have created each page separately, with it’s own version of the menu and sidebars, all the content (text and images), with lots of html code around each item telling it how to display.  You may have advanced to “cascading style sheets” of CSS, which began to create some “shorthand” for that display, but each page was created separately with both content and display code on it.  Changing the display of the site was time-consuming and tedious (and therefore expensive!).  Adding content required special knowledge of code so that you didn’t “mess it up”.

WordPress (and other CMS’s) separate completely your content (text & images) from how they display.  The content is held in separate databases, and when a specific page is called up by a user, the active “theme” tells that content how to display, with the layout (sidebar left or right), the fonts, the colors, etc.  Don’t like the look of your site? A quick change of theme easily creates a new look.

The editors of your website (you?) don’t have access to change the theme, so there’s little to “mess up”.  When you open WordPress to make changes to your site, you are only editing the content databases through the simple user interface, so no special knowledge of codes is required.  If you can use basic word processing software, you can edit your website.

Sometimes it’s confusing for our clients when they don’t understand how the WP theme is separate from the content.  For instance, if early in a project we are working with a client to get the specifics of their WP theme finalized, and they want us to “add a menu tab for Music” — because the theme only tells the content to display, and that menu tab is linked to an actual page, it can only come later when the actual content of the site is created.

 

wpWordPress

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