WordPress is a great solution for most website needs. It’s easy to install, versatile, and it’s backend makes it easy for relative neophytes to add and edit content to websites without needing an advanced degree in Computer Science. This is reflected in its market share: some 40% of all websites are powered by it.
Microsoft Access databases, along with the Backstreet Boys, Sony Discman and Beanie Babies were everywhere in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. Convenient and easy to use, Access became the data bedrock of many small businesses. Fast forward to 2021, and many small businesses and nonprofits have seen the need to leave them Backstreet Boys behind and adapt to the modern era. After all, data often becomes more useful (and easier to manage) when it can be integrated across an organization. WordPress is versatile and powerful enough to do just that, and to automate some functions that used to be manual in Access.
One of the many wonderful things about WordPress is that its barriers to entry are very low. Anyone willing to roll up their sleeves and spend a bit of time viewing YouTube tutorials can build up a site themselves using the many available WordPress themes and plugins and create and manage their own content. While we certainly recommend working with a professional team whenever adding new features/plugins to a site (especially when needing to modify code), and we recognize that not everyone has the time or disposition to take on the work themselves, we also know there are those who like a “hands on approach” to their website, and for those we present you with a list of useful tools and resources to help along the way.
There will be many people whose New Year’s Resolution is to make a WordPress website. Whether it be for a new business or as a hobby, it will be beneficial to take the time to consider common new site owner pitfalls that we see all the time.
WordPress is the world’s leading content management system, and as you would expect, it has loads of built in easy to use features to help you publish your site content how and when you want. However, it surprisingly does not have a method out of the box to schedule content updates to your posts or pages. When we recently needed to enable this feature for a client, I quickly looked to the WordPress plugin repository which is among the greatest advantages of using the platform. Thousands of plugins are available to expand upon the base set of features for everything that you can imagine: eCommerce, event management, user forums, learning management, and the list goes on. Virtually anything you can envision doing on a website typically has at least three or four very well supported, feature rich, and heavily used and vetted plugin alternatives to choose from depending on your specific needs. This is why we were rather surprised to find the available options for the relatively simple and presumably common task of scheduling content updates to be decidedly slim. Even many of our old friend content management systems that time has passed by, such as Website Baker, offered this feature out of the box in a simple to use format. After some deeper digging we finally found a plugin based solution that, though not installed on that many sites (600+ as of this writing), had some very quality positive reviews and a well established legacy so we decided to give it a closer look and try it out. The plugin we chose is Content Update Scheduler by Infinitnet.
Having a WordPress site is a great way to present your ideas with the outside world. However, there comes a time when this one-way communication is insufficient for your organization’s needs. bbPress is an excellent tool to engage your user community in a variety of ways.
These days most of us use at least one cloud file-sharing service, such as Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive, to sync files between devices and share files with friends or work associates. What you might not have considered is how those same services can integrate with your WordPress website to provide some valuable enhancements.
Personnel changes are a part of life for every organization. If your business uses a WordPress website you may find it difficult to bring new employees on board to replace the departed personnel. Preparing for this eventuality ahead of time will pay big dividends. Below are a few tips observed from our experiences.
Email is a great way to keep in touch with your site’s users. Customizing existing email notifications and adding more of your own can make your site more useful and informative for your users. There are many ways to improve, upgrade, or add-to your site’s email notifications.
WordPress development is a complicated process. You are juggling themes, plugins, images, page content, forms, and possibly Ecommerce. With all this development going on it is easy to overlook something basic but very important: email sending. Today we will discuss how to improve your WordPress site’s email sending.