This morning the head of the IT department at work dropped by my desk, as usual, and I decided to ask him for advice about Wordpress websites and he gave me lots of tips as follows:Some useful plugins:
- Yoast Search engine optimiser: allows you to control what sites like Google display under your link on their pages. He advised me to tick the site's 'discourage search engines' option while my site was under development and to remember to unclick it once the site had been launched. Allows you to condense long URL's (or something.)
- Broken link (resolver?): if you have a link within the text of your site, you can run this program to see if any of your links are broken.Google analytics by Yoast: helps you measure stuff I guess.
- He advised me to use BackWPup (he hadn't heard of Akeeba Backup) and he advised me
- to get an account with Amazon S3, where you can backup large websites away from your own server, at an expense of pennies per month.
- Studiopress are a company that produce secure themes (he showed me around some 'live' theme demos on their site). They are run by many of the people who work on the security of Wordpress itself he said (Wordpress is free so this is how they make their money) and all their sites are designed to be very secure. They have a fantastic range of the most beautiful designs and their support is very good. All their designs are child versions of the Genesis Framework theme. You can get a developers licence for $399 that allows you to use any of their sites for life, or you can pay a lifetime fee ($99) to use a design. They offer good support too.
- If you have several Wordpress sites you can set them up as a Wordpress network, allowing each user their own area and login.
- Advance Custom Fields: this plugin allows you to create little blog sections within your site so that tech noobs (I am trying to politely say 'idiots') can, for instance, edit or create their own pages. A draft page then gets sent to you for your approval.
- Gravity Forms is a similar survey and forms plug-in. All this is quite challenging and exciting. I have some friends who need websites and I intend to try some of these ideas out later in the spring.
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