Search has penetrated the very fabric of global society. The way people work, play, shop, research, and interact has changed forever. Organisations of all kinds (businesses and charities), as well as individuals, need to have a presence on the web – and they need the search engines to bring them traffic.[The Art of SEO - Mastering Search Engine Optimisation. Enge,Eric; Fishkin,Rand; Spencer,Stephan; Stricchiola, Jessie; O'Reilly Publishing, 2010]

We see web addresses [url's] everywhere in our daily life now. On public transport, on vans, trucks, cars, in shops, on TV, in newspapers, on buildings and certainly within advertising of all kinds. Why? Because the Internet is here and it is here to stay. but whereas, a few years ago, there were many people making their own websites and then going on to call themselves ‘web designers’, such has been the increase and technogical shift, that is usually very obvious as to whether or not a website has been created at home or by a professional. Even if it does not plainly show via the front page of a website, it certainly will once the professional takes a look at what is happening behind the scenes.

With this new shift, the creation of a website has become far more serious and is no longer just a simple matter of typing some text, throwing in a few images and hoping people will come along and visit. We now have open source software which allows for all of us to obtain professional material but without the exhorbitant fees that some commercial software companies will charge. The great news with this, is that it can keep your costs down low and, as it is usually founded on a strong community support, it can cater for all demands.

So, no longer do we have the simple website with a nice title, a few pages of text and some photos taken by amateurs in the backyard. Databases are now built-in to a website and store all the content. The aesthetics of a website are usually wrapped around this content and with most sites, are usually called layouts or themes. And, dependent on which type of software you opt for, there can be thousands of themes available. Additionally, we now have graphic designers, SEO experts, RSS technicians and a plethora of other personnel, who are all specialised in given areas that make up the components of your website.

Sure, you could still make a website yourself and yes, the remote possibility ifs there that it may even work out for you, but the reality is, it will most likely fail.

And by now, you must be thinking – this all sounds very complicated and that usually means very expensive. No, not necessarily and we at FreshlyPressed strive to keep it all down to a very reasonable price.

But, I digress. Sure, websites have taken a giant leap forward in how they are made and how they work – but why does a business or organisation really need one? The simple answer is – because without a website, you are missing out on potential customers. Like many people, I rarely buy the newspaper anymore, I read my news online and if I need to find an address, a phone number, a business of any kind – I simply turn to the Internet. I cannot remember the last time I looked at a Yellow Pages and if I do see an ad offline for any business and then discover it has no website, I usually drop it and turn elsewhere.

The Internet operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a wekk, 365 days a year. Emails can takes as little as milliseconds. Information that may take your hours to impart via phone and brochures, can be instantly obtained.

Make no mistake – your website is more than a novelty. It is vital. It is your shop-front for millions. And without it there in front of them, potential customers will simply go somewhere else.

We will be writing more about what makes a website stand out in front of others [in many more articles to come] but for the moment, if you do not have a website for your business, perhaps NOW is the time to think very carefully about changing this situation as quickly as you can.

Permalinks often confuse people and this is probably because the term may sound a bit technical when first getting started with WordPress. However, when you think about it, the name does explain their purpose. It simply makes the ‘link’ in the url a pretty ‘permanent’ one. For example, without permalinks a default WordPress post would look like this: ‘http://jamesict.com/?p=2?. And as you can see, it is not exactly pretty is it? So, the alternative is to set the permalinks into action which will change the url completely.
Now the thing is, it can be set in many ways, with the most common one in use being to set the year/month and post name as the path in the url. This means that a post titled Permalinks are Pretty would become ‘http://jamesict.com/2008/11/permalinks-are-pretty’. The choice of inclusion in the permalink of the year and the month is so that if you have another post of the same name, say 2 years down the track when you have thousands of posts and cannot remember all the names, you will not produce a duplicate post with the same permalink. All makes perfect sense when you think about it.

So that explains what a permalink is and what it does. The next step is to work out how to actually set them in motion.

Unfortunately, this is where it takes a twist and turn and things get a little bit more tricky. Setting the permalinks structure via the admin panel – Settings – Permalinks, is easy enough, but when you first attempt to do this, it will not work. And yes, there is a perfectly good reason as to why not. You see, when you make this adjustment, the structure change tries to write some code to a particular file and the problem is [especially if you have a new WordPress default install], it is most likely you do not have this file at all. It is called .htaccess and is nothing more than a simple txt file with it’s only purpose being that it will include little bits of code that will be server specific and make such things as permalinks work. it’s to do with something called mod_rewrite, but I’ll let you read all about that in the Codex if it really interests you that much.

The point here is that it is very easy to make a .htaccess file. It can be done in virtually any text editor by opening a new file and then saving it as .htaccess. Notice there is nothing in front of ‘.’ and don’t worry, this is not a typo. and no, no need to write anything whatsoever in the file. Trust me – it’s not necessary.

So you make this file and the next step is to get it online. Again, tricky if you have never used something called FTP, but remarkably easy if you have. All you need to do is upload your .htaccess file to where your WordPress root files reside on your server. If you are not sure where this may be, just look for the location where there are lots of files all beginning with ‘wp-’ and drop in the same directory on your server. That’s that then? No, not quite, but almost.

This particular file needs to be written to when you make the changes via your admin panel, as mentioned above, and in order for this to happen, you need to give the file some special permissions. Again, this can be server specific, but more often than not, you can give it a permission of 777 [using your FTP program will accomplish this task] and then make the changes to your permalink structure in your admin panel. This is a security risk though, so as soon as you have made the changes, you should go back into your FTP and set the permissions back to something like 644. This will keep it safe enough from anyone doing any damage should they be of a ‘hacking’ character and inclined to be nasty to your and all your family.

In conclusion then, making the changes required to set your site to permalinks, is easy enough, but does require a few steps. The good news is that once it is done, you will probably not have to touch them again for as long as you wish to keep your site this way.

If you decide this is all too hard, just get in touch and I will give you a hand…

Two plugins that I highly recommend are:

1. Admin Management Xtended:
When you want to edit properties of posts/pages, you’ll have to open the edit page, set the new options and save the post/page… which obviously takes time. For those who are using WordPress as a CMS, it’s important to be able to manage contents easily and quickly. That’s what this plugin helps to do.

It adds some icons to the Manage posts/pages view with AJAX-driven CMS-known functions like toggling post/page visibility, changing publication date and title without having to open the edit screens or reload the page. Plus changing page order via Drag’n’Drop *, inline category management and inline tag management.

2. Reveal ID’s for WP Admin
With WordPress 2.5 being released, the post IDs in the Manage Posts/Pages view were removed as it is. Propably due to the fact that the common user dont need them. However, for advanced WordPress Users/ developers those IDs were quite interesting for some plugins or template tags.

What this plugin does is to reveal most removed entry IDs on admin pages, showing the entry IDs, as it was in versions prior to 2.5

One of the latest features of WordPress is the inclusion of post revisions [since about version 2.6 if memory serves me correctly] and whilst I can see the use of it in some instances, personally, I would rather it was not automatically enabled.

Basically, it is an autosave function and I find that it gets in my way rather than helps me in my writing. There is always going to be that instance when I wish it was there I guess, but having not had it in place for so long, i just don’t need it now.

So, how to disable it? It would be nice if there was a tickbox which would allow for this, but unfortunately there isn’t. So it involves a simple piece of code being added to your wp-config.php file.

To do this, you need a text editor [no. not Notepad] and you simply add the following line of code to the file [directly under the other lines of 'define' already in place].

define(’WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);

Alternatively, you can limit the amount of post revisions saved if you wish. use the following coe and change the number ’4′ to whatever suits you best:

define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’,4);

There is also a simple little plugin that will do this for you at http://exper.3drecursions.com/2008/07/25/disable-revisions-and-autosave-plugin/

Deleting Post Revisions already made.

One other aspect to mention here too. It may be that you already have lost of post revisions and you now want to get rid of them all. This does involve using phpMyAdmin though [or other MySQL manager] and you need to run a bit of code via your SQL QUERY panel. [Original source: via]

DELETE a,b,c
FROM wp_posts a
LEFT JOIN wp_term_relationships b ON (a.ID = b.object_id)
LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta c ON (a.ID = c.post_id)
WHERE a.post_type = ‘revision’

Just make sure that your WordPress installation is using the prefix: wp_

If not, adjust the code to suit your changed prefix.

[As always, if you need a hand to do any of this, please do get in touch with us.]

As more and more versions of WordPress are released, unfortunately more and more hacks become prevalent, especially in outdated versions. So, the obvious way to keep your WordPress installation secure, is to keep your site upgraded to the latest version. This is the Number One way to keep your safe free of hacks.

However, there are many other things you can do, including the following:

1. Make sure you do not give unnecessary ‘Write’ permissions to directories and files that do not need it [done via FTP].

2. Moderate your registrations for users on your site.

3. Use secure passwords.

All very simplistic and not very hard to implement and yet in doing so, you will make your site so much more secure.

I am constantly amazed at how many sites I work on for people, that have such simple passwords in place. If your name is John, it is probably not the best idea to use ‘john‘ as your password. And yes, this would seem obvious, but as I say, I see this kind of thing all the time. Look at it this way: no amount of secuirty will keep out unwanted visits to your files, if you are silly enough to leave the key on display at the front door.

Of course, one of your best safeguards if you are hacked and you are at risk of losing all of your site content, is to make sure you do regular backups of your database. This will be covered in a more in-depth article to come soon, but for now, let me highly recommend that you do at least a ‘weekly’ backup of your database. It really does give you peace of mind.

A few excellent articles on WordPress security:

Is your WordPress blog hacked?

Hardening WordPress

WordPress Hacked

FTP also provides much more flexibility in how you choose to keep your file structures on your site. By default, WordPress will upload files to a directory structure such as /wp-content/uploads/year/month/filename which is fine, but if you are like me, you may prefer to keep all of your audio files in one location and all of your images in another. FTP enables this choice – WordPresss does not.
So, if you would like to have more control of how you set up your themes, and upload your files and plugins, then FTP is an obvious need.

And luckily, there are many free FTP clients available for you to choose – even in the form of addons in browsers such as Firefox.

Three free FTP clients that I highly recommend:

FireFTP [a Firefox addon] ~ AL FTP ~ Filezilla

Because each time a page on your site loads, if your browser has to execute any PHP queries, it adds to the load time. So, the obvious thing to do to reuce this waste of time is to replace the PHP queries with static HTML. That way, every time a page loads, your browser just reads the HTML instead of having to contact the database.

I have found myself thinking quite a lot about this recently, with making a new theme. Because a theme is for multiple users, you have no choice but to make it do a lot of queries, but if you are happy with your chosen theme, why not take a minute to look through and see what changes you can make.

Here is a typical example:

Often in the header of a theme you will see the following or similar:
[php]
<?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?>
[/php]

This will mean the site, when loading, will do a database query to find the domain name. To stop this from happening, you simply need to enter the domain name yourself and remove the query. Of course, if you only have a couple you will not notice much in terms of gained speed on your site, but if there are many – and that is more often than not, the case with many themes – then making these changes will make a significant difference.

The strange part, when we talk to local customers, is that they feel we need to sit down in an office and talk, look at each other and shake hands, for it to feel as if the business/client relationship is actually in place.

But, with the technologies we have at our disposal today, it really does not need to happen that we actually meet in the flesh.

So, how does someone who has decided that they may like to give FreshlyPressed a try, go about making it all happen? Don’t worry – this is very easy!

All you need to have is an idea of what you want to have online in your website. And if you have absolutely no idea, then that is where we sidle up beside you ‘metaphorically speaking of course’ and help you decide what you need.

And there are several ways we can communicate with you whilst all this is happening.

1. We can pick up that most marvellous of inventions, generally known as a telephone and we can chat.

2. We have a newer and probably better means of communication in regards to transferring data and information, yes, the Internet and Email.

3. We can set up a chat link, again on the Internet, or alternatively, invite you to use our forum [where a private area just for you and us] can easily be set up for us to talk about all the possibilities on offer.

Back to our original question then – Does your web designer need to live next door?

The answer has to be – NO.

With all of the options outlined above and with so many different ways of sending information, now that the Internet is here, it makes no difference to us, or to you if we are honest, whether you live next door, in the same building or 15,000 miles away on the other side of the world.

You send us your information and requests for design and whatever else – and we compile it and get it up and running.

Yes, the times have changed…