Foster Solutions (FSI)

Bonnie Taub-Dix is a published author and a national spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association.  She has been a regular guest on national television and provided advice for a multitude of publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today.

FSI migrated her static website to WordPress, so she can now edit her content. The site utilizes new features in WordPress 3.0 with custom post types, so she can easily manager her media appearances, testimonials and announcements.

Through custom programming, FSI created a dynamic media page where users can easily navigate to view her videos, newspaper appearances, TV appearances, etc.

This was an email posted in the wwwac.org listserv.  It’s a nice overview of the pros and cons of the “big three” open source CMSs.

WordPress is wonderful for a basic content site, especially for blogs and personal stuff. Lots of plugins to add functionality, fairly easy to use right out of the box for a person with minor technical skills. With a bit of study, one can learn how to customize it and personalize it.

I used to use Joomla, and its predecessor Mambo, after years of building custom PHP-based CMS sites.

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Gena Lisa Lingerie is a successful women’s fitting shop in Nyack, NY.

FSI worked with graphic designer Michael Meyerowitz to create a custom design that shows off Gena’s personal approach and her slightly-sexy clothing lines.

The site was built in WordPress, allowing the client is easily able to maintain the clothing lines and testimonials, using WordPress’ new custom post types.

If you need to migrate WordPress to another server, sometimes it will have a different URL. That will break all the image links in the content of the pages.

The best thing to do is do a bulk replace in MySQL.  The command is as follows

update wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content, ‘searchURL’, ‘replaceURL’);

Sometimes you want to show future posts, likely when you have posts that are events.

<?php
// ———— added for events to show future
if(is_category(‘events’))
query_posts($query_string . ‘&order=ASC&post_status=future’);

while (have_posts()) : the_post();

if(is_category(‘events’)) {
if(strtotime($post->post_date) < time())
continue;
}
?>

Whether you’re a beginner in SEO or a seasoned pro, it’s important to keep up on how your pages will be displayed in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) across each engine. Every engine displays your page differently and depending on what you are trying to target there are different approaches to optimizing by engine. This article is not to tell you how to optimize your pages, it is merely to give you the current character count that is displayed for the Title Tags and Meta Descriptions for Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com

A few years ago (2004), Yahoo would display up to 120 characters in the Title Tag. Can you believe it? So much has changed since then. Earlier this year, we had MSN. Now we have Bing. Do you know the proper meta description length displayed in Bing?

GOOGLE

Google shows 69 Characters (Including Spaces) for Page Title.

Google shows 156 Characters (Including Spaces) for Meta Description.

It should also be known that if you don’t include a Meta Description or if Google feels a better description for your page could be given by using a web snippet, then the description shown can be up to 320 characters. Of course, they won’t be the characters that you choose so they might not best represent what you wish your audience to see in the SERP’s.

Also, check out SEO Tidbits to see a Google engineer explain why Google does not use Meta key words at all.

Yahoo

It appears that Yahoo shows up to 72 Characters (Including Spaces) for a Page Title. (PDF’s up to 75 characters)

Yahoo shows up to 161 Characters (Including Spaces) for Meta Description.

Bing

According to the Bing Webmaster Blog:

Bing shows 65 Characters (Including Spaces) for a Page Title Tag.

Bing shows up to 150 Characters (Including Spaces) for Meta Description Tag.

However, as you can see in the example above, Bing will readily show 69 characters for the Title Tag and up to 185 for the description.

Ask.com

Ask shows 69 Characters (Including Spaces) for an SEO Page Title.

It appears that Ask.com pulls a snippet of text from the page and can commonly display around 312 characters for a description.

Credit: SageRock

One must be very wary of paying for SEO on their site. Click HERE for a harsh critique of those making a living doing SEO.

Here is a useful short video from Google saying they don’t use meta keyword tags at all:

Thanks Matt Varone on this function to check if the current page is a subpage.  WP should have made this a core function

http://www.mattvarone.com/wordpress/is_subpage-function/

A useful companion item is to create a template for a parent page where you only want to redirect it to the first subpage.  Sometimes you don’t want a page for the parent at all, just the children.

From WPRecipes:

http://www.wprecipes.com/wordpress-page-template-to-redirect-to-first-child-page

Cursors are frowned upon, but I have found times when performance of update query sets are too slow.  I believe this happens when the recovery model is full.

The T-SQL below creates a cursor on a table and then steps through each record and updates several fields.  This ended up taking about 4 minutes on an 18k record database, which is small, but would take 20 minutes just to update 200 records in the same table with an update query.

ALTER procedure [dbo].[sp_updateDemoData] as

declare @mallId nchar(6)
declare @RowNum int
declare @showme int

set @showme = 0

declare malllist cursor for
select mallcode from mall_exp_trend_2010 where pop_20 > 0
OPEN malllist
FETCH NEXT FROM malllist
INTO @mallId
set @RowNum = 0
WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
BEGIN
set @RowNum = @RowNum + 1
set @showme = @showme + 1

Update e set
e.NUMBER_OF_HOUSEHOLDS_10 = ns.HH_10, e.NUMBER_OF_HOUSEHOLDS_20 = ns.HH_20, e.NUMBER_OF_HOUSEHOLDS_5 = ns.HH_5,
e.AVREGE_HOUSEHOLD_INC_10 = ns.INC_10, e.AVREGE_HOUSEHOLD_INC_20 = ns.INC_20, e.AVREGE_HOUSEHOLD_INC_5 = ns.INC_5,
e.MEDIAN_AGE_10 = ns.AGE_10, e.MEDIAN_AGE_20 = ns.AGE_20, e.MEDIAN_AGE_5 = ns.AGE_5,
e.POPULATION_10 = ns.POP_10, e.POPULATION_20 = ns.POP_20, POPULATION_5 = ns.POP_5
from mallsysNetT1.dbo._mall e, mall_exp_trend_2010 ns
where ns.MALLCODE = e.MALLCODE and e.MALLCODE = @mallId;

if @showme = 100
BEGIN
print ‘processed records: ‘ + cast(@RowNum as char(6)) — + ‘ ‘ + @mallId
set @showme = 0
END

FETCH NEXT FROM malllist
INTO @mallId
END
CLOSE malllist
DEALLOCATE malllist

WordPress is an amazing product, and Fantastico Deluxe helps with the install, but there are some issues and best practices.

When installing WP using Fantastico, make sure the permissions are secure after installation.  Fantastico usually sets permissions on the public_html directory to an incorrect “755″.  Make sure they are “750.”

Make sure the wp-config.php file permissions are set to “400.”

I’ve had two sites hacked into soon after installation so this is not just an academic exercise.

Settings

• Definitely change the permalinks.  I don’t know why they default it with a URL (?p=123) format.  You want smart names for your links. If you are going to add lots of posts, you may want to select the “Month and name” format.  If not, go to custom Structure and put in /%postname%/
• Under media, you will likely want to uncheck the “Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders”, unless you will have messloads of images you’ll be uploading.  Definitely check the settings for sizes of images in medium and large.  You will likely want to reduce the large to something like 800 px max.
• Reading — Unless this is a straight blog, you’ll probably want to create a page called “home” and one called “blog” and then go to the reading panel and set the front page display to static and set the home and blog pages.
  

Here are some must-have plugins:

• My Page Order — Great for setting order of pages in menu.
• All in One SEO Pack — Most popular and robust plugin for SEO
• Google XML Sitemaps — Will keep your sitemaps xml file up to date
• Reveal IDs for WP Admin — Useful admin tool
• List category posts — Useful if post categories are used as a taxonomy, and you want to get a list of specific categories.
• Theme My Login — Creates a nice login page based on the active theme.
• NextGen Gallery — The best in managing pic galleries
• Exclude Pages from Navigation — Excludes pages if desired
• Theme Switcher Reloaded — Great for development, allowing clients to view various themes.
• Custom Post Type UI — This takes advantage of WP 2.9+ custom post types.
• Members — This plugin allow the admin to manage roles for different levels of users.
• White Label CMS –This customized the admin section.  You can minimize to the items you want the user to see.
• CMS Tree Page View — This will insert a new menu item under page which gives a tree view of the pages.  For sites with lots of pages and subpages, this is a better way to navigate pages in the admin section.
• Google Analyticator– There are several Google Analytics plugins, but this seems the best, which includes a nice dashboard widget/panel to view analytics from WordPress.
• Simple CMS — This is a basic plugin that simplifies the admin page for Editors and below.  There is no way to change the settings, but it is a quick way to reduce the clutter for clients.