A Liverpool Web Designer

Well I never… tucked away, quietly ticking over, is http://m.wordpress.com

It’s a simple interface to your WordPress.com admin, designed to be fast on simple machines, mobile phones and limited bandwidth connections.

I’m ashamed to say I only just noticed, but by golly it’s handy.  It gives you basic stats, and basic posting.  Very basic posting.  But it’s there as an option and has its uses as the cleverer tricks for mobile posting to self-hosted WordPress installations aren’t possible on WordPress.com

You may find passwords to be an unecessary chore. But they’re important. However, inventing strong passwords is difficult… and they’re hard to remember.

So you need to be able to generate passwords on the go.
Go see Password Maker - a great way to have safe, difficult to crack passwords which works beautifully as browser plugins.

The nice thing is that if one password is found out because of a compromised website, because PasswordMaker generates a different password for each site, you’re still secure everywhere else. Of course, if someone finds out your master password and works out what your encryption settings are and knows that you’re using such a system then they can get in to everything. But you’re not that careless are you?

You may want to reduce down the characters in use for passwords a little so that you don’t get characters that many sites don’t like - for example, WordPress doesn’t like slashes.

Make a note of the exact character set, encryption method, lengths and so on. You may need these at some point. However, without the master password, this information is of limited use, and you don’t have to write it in a way that can be understood by anyone else but you.

Make a habit of using this system wherever possible. You’ll find life a lot easier, and more secure, if you use it consistently.

I was working with a client recently on their own, customised installation of WordPress… and it was driving me potty.  It was a pretty tiring day, given that our normal training covers concepts such as drafts.  On their installation, you pressed save and the page (no posts on that one) would immediately appear on the navigation.  Not only that, but changing a page order had no effect on the javascript based menu system they’d implemented.

Now, we’re not innocent on this either - we’ve done a few sites that get a long way from standard WordPress behaviour.  But quite quickly we realised that not keeping standard messes you up in certain ways:

1. Upgrades can be a nightmare as customisation may need to be re-applied - even if it’s just a theme you’ve developed.
2. Training becomes difficult - especially if the people managing the content aren’t IT or WordPress experts.  They won’t know what is and is not standard and documentation may therefore be confusing.
3. If you need outside help, they’re going to have a learning curve before they understand what’s going on.
4. Slapping a load of plugins into WordPress isn’t always the best way to extend the functionality of the system or a theme you’ve bought or downloaded.  It may be better to find a different CMS or a different theme.

So as time went by, we started to keep our themes more standard in their behaviour, and to stick to well known, well written and well supported plugins.  All have to work in standard ways, and any that do quite blatant hacks have to be left well alone - no matter how cute.

I believe the same applies with most software.  If you bought MS Word and then hacked it to work differently, then every other installation of it that you use with it would need the same hack for you to achieve the same work.  And imagine if you implemented this hacked MS Word across a company - new employees wouldn’t know what was going on as they’d know Word, but not this special version, and when a new version came out you’d have a lot of work to do to hack that too.

I used to apply the same philosophy PeopleSoft implementations - recommending against large tranches of customisation, because they became a maintenance and upgrade liability.  The sites that listened to this common advice, tended to have the most pain-free go-lives and upgrades.  The downside was that I was kind of doing myself out of work - what with being a strong PeopleCode developer.  D’Oh!

For those of you who are fans of our Anvil WordPress Theme, a new version - 1.3 has just been released and is now available to download.  I’ve been testing it out on my own blog (at least, at the date of writing - that may change in the future) and it’s still one of our favourites.  It’s flexible, powerful, and easy to customise.

To download it, simply go to the official Anvil Demo Site and get it from there.  The site also has plenty of information on the theme’s features.

If you change a slug in WordPress it will automatically generate a 301 redirect - helping keep your search engine juice nice and rich.

Try it with the following link - it shouldn’t work, and I’ve not done anything manually.  Yet it does:

http://www.interconnectit.com/wordpress-course-7th-8th-february-2008/

Some nice tricks inside WordPress.  Keep up the good work lads!

Please Note - This version of the guide is now obsolete and been superceded by our WordPress 2.6 User Guide which can be downloaded from Spectacu.la

One of the things lacking, in the free downloads world, so far as we could see, was a simple, easy to follow WordPress guide designed for non-techie WordPress users.

[digg=http://digg.com/software/New_WordPress_User_Guide_in_pdf_Format]

There are two versions available - the latest which is for WordPress 2.6, and the previous version for WordPress 2.3 - the latest is only available from our Spectacu.la WordPress Themes Club.

To download the NEW WordPress User Guide follow this link to Spectacu.la

Download the OLD! WordPress User Guide Version 2 beta for WP 2.3

I think the document still needs work, but I would greatly appreciate any feedback, comments, or even offers of assistance. It would be quite nice to GPL this but we haven’t done so yet and I personally am 50/50 about it. What do you think?

If you want to help popularise this guide, please digg it, or add it to your favourite social bookmarking system - it would be much appreciated!

I’m not going to rant here about all the great clients, who understand that time is expensive, who listen, pay attention, and do their own research.

But what I do think is that there’s a significant chunk of people out there, with no clue as to the Web, what it’s for, and how it works, who currently seem to be desperate to jump onto the bandwagon. They sometimes actually have some pretty sound business ideas.

Thing is, they turn up at our office with these huge plans. And a budget of £250.

There then follows an awkward silence as we have to explain that £250, like in dentistry, doesn’t really buy you a great deal of cosmetic awe. Even if the underlying software is free, you still need someone with the ability and understanding to implement it correctly. And they’re in demand.

But then that brings up another issue - the one of the wannabe web designer. Very little understanding of the technology or business, but does have a copy of Frontpage, Dreamweaver, or worst of all - Flash and only Flash. And thinks they can design for the web because they’ve done some ok print jobs in their time. They over promise, often raising expectations, under-quote (causing pricing pressure) and under-deliver.

Not all are actually that bad in overall design terms either, but they have a habit of disappearing when things get difficult. If one of their sites is hacked they have absolutely no idea why, and can’t do much about it. They don’t understand what the difference between CHMOD 777 or 766 can mean to the security of their site. In fact, to make their life easier, they simply switch everything to 777. And they’ve got so little money from their £300 job that they most definitely can’t afford to pay a TruePro (my TM, maybe. Perhaps) to come in and get digging, and to configure their site correctly.

And clients sometimes need to accept that they can’t just say “gimme a website!” to a designer/developer and expect them to magically mind-read their true desires. For free, of course.

Thing is - how’s a client to know the difference between a good or bad web company? It’s no easier than knowing the difference between a good or bad engine design in a car. The only way people learn is by watching what or who gets the most reliable, dependable and economical cars out there. And if there are none, then eventually someone will come along and do just that. Like the Japanese did to the British motorbike industry, so, surely, will the good web companies overtake and close down the bad ones.

So to answer my own question - I actually think the web industry does suck right now. But it’ll get better - slowly, top web brands will move to the fore, and the rubbish ones will fade away. And it won’t be from expected sources either. For example, WordPress.com is likely to become a major force for many small business websites, with many moving to self-hosted WordPress sites once they need more control or uniqueness. Why does any startup in a non-tech field need to commission a custom site when there’s plenty of great, free or cheap designs available?

And that’s where the future website designing and hosting brands will come from. The small one man web companies need to adapt to this market and consider that the direct one-to-one model of web design & development is approaching its death knell. Instead, these small companies will become facilitators - finding the best solutions for the non-techie clients, setting them up, and then briskly moving on to the next client. The technical knowhow, fixing up and hacking will be concentrated in key points. They’ll set up or review systems like SugarCRM, Plone, WordPress, and more.

[digg=http://digg.com/business_finance/Does_the_web_industry_suck]Bigger clients will of course still need their own web applications built to suit any unique business models they operate, and they’ll be able to afford the fact that few of these can ever cost less than five figures. So that business model will continue, and should pay more too as the solutions become critical to firms.

I know I’ve just had something of a ramble there - it’s purely a stream of consciousness thing. I think the web industry is on the verge of maturing. That doesn’t mean the days are over for specialists. Just that the mass market will move to commodity systems, while the specialised stuff will actually start to pay the kind of rewards that should be available to people who work with a difficult and challenging technology.

Want to know how we keep track of all those websites and bugs?

It’s quite simple - we use Mantis Bug Tracker.   It’s not as powerful as some, but we’re a three man company - a more heavy solution would probably simply be going over the top with things and would carry a support load that we simply wouldn’t be happy with.

In other words, it’s a great fit for our needs and requirements today, and for the next few years.

I was reading through some project management methodology just now (yay! My life is full of joy at last!) and came across the phrase “The Wicked Problem” in this line on Wikipedia:

Steve McConnell in Code Complete (a book which criticizes the widespread use of the waterfall model) refers to design as a “wicked problem” - a problem whose requirements and limitations cannot be entirely known before completion. The implication is that it is impossible to get one phase of software development “perfected” before time is spent in “reconnaissance” working out exactly where and what the big problems are.

It’s worth following the link.

I think software and design processes often end up trapped within this circle where nothing’s ever perfect. The iPhone isn’t perfect, for example - it may be ever so pretty, but it’s quite rubbish at Bluetooth connectivity, for example, or sending texts. In fact, it’s rubbish at a lot of things. One of its smartphone rivals, the N95, has a habit of crashing in certain situations, and flattening its battery in two hours because it’s furiously running an application in the background.

Same with websites. Our company site, Interconnect IT, will never ever, in my opinion, be perfect. Unless we simply devoted all our energies to that site - but then we’d have no time to working on client projects. We’re still a three man company, so we can’t have a £200k site. But we can be clever and cover 95% of the requirements.

With client sites it’s even trickier - we have to interpret a clients’ requirements, write them down, and send them back in a proposal with a rough mock-up, pricing and structure. They’ll read it quickly and usually accept. But once started they’ll look at the design, try it out, and realise that actually, the front page should have a simpler message. That may mean a restructuring. A week later, someone may point out that the colours they preferred have negative connotations in certain cultures.

All these require changes, sometimes at a late stage, and sometimes involving a lot of work. At some point, someone has to simply say - “OK, that’s good enough!”

Other clients, however, quite like the waterfall method. We have forms for certain business sectors, with consistent requirements, where they simply tick off what they want and like, choose an off-the-shelf design, and a couple of weeks later we deliver the website - all loaded up and everything. They then sign-off, or they ask for some revisions - images changed, copy edited and so on. It’s particularly suited where a small and busy firm needs a website, but it’s not really crucial to their business - it simply provides a service to people who already know them. Dentists, for example.

One thing worth thinking about in 2008, is fixing the DNS entry to your website. Most here are probably set up just fine, but here’s one of the most common problems we see:

Go to a website - eg, http://www.marketsafeuk.com and it should all work fine.

But take out the www and go to http://marketsafeuk.com and it doesn’t.  You just get a time out as the DNS fails to resolve the request.

This happens on a remarkable number of sites, even those belonging to some web designers. And it’s poor because a lot of users have got used to not typing the www subdomain to many addresses. They expect the null subdomain to point to the normal website. How many customers would Amazon miss out on if going to amazon.co.uk didn’t work? Lots….

So - if your site experiences this problem go into your domain’s control panel and set up a new A record where the subdomain is left uncompleted. The ip address should be the same as your usual one. Most control panels should allow this.

Your webserver, in most cases, will be set up by default to serve a blank subdomain the same way as the www one. If not, you may need to talk to your hosts about resolving this.