wordpress

Simon Dickson at WordCampUK

Quick notes on Simon Dickson‘s presentation at WordCampUK:

  1. Make big change happen in a small way
  2. Didn’t intend to be a WP fanboy, but it just turned out to be the best way of doing things
  3. Need for a WP ecosystem – WP now mature enough to require/support a real community
  4. PHP geeks not enough – need to understand the simplicity of the platform
  5. Simon not a developer, or designer. Can get by, but could do with some help!
  6. Three threats: procurement teams, IT people and
  7. Big web projects cost far too much – hundreds of thousands, millions even. Not just the systems, but the project management etc
  8. Free platforms has benefits, including longevity and ongoing support
  9. Simon started using typepad mainly, as seemed easier. No need for IT depts to know about what people were doing. WP.com takes that to a new level.
  10. Typepad has limitations – too blog focused. Need WP’s flexibility especially that which you get from self-hosted
  11. Up to 30% of WP.com blogs now are custom domained / CSS etc
  12. Appeals of WP – zero cost (can send the wrong message), skills base (lots of local talent to draw on)
  13. Designed for use by the individual – no need for support, it’s so easy to use. Upgrade cycle the only glitch
  14. Focus on content – it’s NOT about the tech – also don’t have to wade through metadata fields before writing content. Make it like writing something in Word (sad but true)
  15. Power of RSS – category based, tag based, integrated wordpress mini sites into the big ugly corporate CMS. Use SimplePie and Google API
  16. Do you mention the word ‘blog’ in relation to WP? Initially no, but maybe mention it early then move on. Blog not as dirty a word as it was. Ingrained in culture. BBC news journalists are known by their blogs as much as anything
  17. ourNHS site – built 3 times in 12 months, but so what? Quick, easy and cheap. Lord Darzi’s blog – discussion at time about referring to it as that
  18. Incredible power in themes
  19. “can WordPress do X?” YES! It’s just HTML and PHP folks.
  20. Automate as much as possible through the WP loop
  21. With WP sites, build it then walk. Very very few support requests
  22. WordPress in Welsh with the Wales Office site
  23. New number 10 website is running on wordpress. Round of applause for Simon
  24. Number 10 – what they do is news. News is blogs. Hence, blogging the right medium.
  25. Blogging and political journalism are merging
  26. When dealing with big orgs, form a precedent quickly. No. 10 started using youtube first in uk gov, now everyone is at it!
  27. No. 10 Twitter feed – c3,500 followers – people wanting to be a part of the conversation re: uk gov. Amazing!
  28. No, 10 uses Brightcove for video hosting etc
  29. Key message: acceptance of lightweight, social tools
  30. Security testing of No. 10 – heavyweight testing going on. Will be fed back to Automattic
  31. Micro sites, sites within sites…Can be thrown together fast, run as long as you need them, then close
  32. Theme switching – WP allows one-click change of template. Have some themes developed for certain incidents, can turn on when needed
  33. WordPress as crisis site when required. Have sitting in the background til when needed.
  34. What’s needed in WordPress to get into enterprise environment: page ordering (need rag and drop built in), slicker workflow (better pending/drafts handling), new long term support version (like ubuntu, don’t call it legacy branch!) ie better upgrades, the ecosystem/community (we need people that understand WP available and on call!)
  35. Developers – need to understand content and designers need to understand the WP machinery
  36. WP generalists?

SEO for WordPress

Here’s some notes from the session at WordCampUK on SEO for WordPress, presented by Nick Garner of Betfair. Will tidy up later with more links and stuff.

  1. you can’t hold your website users’ hands the whole time. SEO can make it easier for them to find what they want
  2. What have you got that others don’t? What do you want on your site? Structure your content for search engines, use analytics and get social with links
  3. Using WordPress with the right plugins helps
  4. Content – useful and entertaining? Can the people writing your content actually write well? Need for enthusiasm. Would you read your content?
  5. Jon Bounds tweets – “ I’d love a discussion about whether or not it’s all a bit vulgar, rather than how to do it.”
  6. Who do you want to visit your site? Motivation: PR, money making or ego? Picture your reader and write for them
  7. Think like a librarian when structuring content: correct titles, categorisation, avoid duplication
  8. When building sites, get metadata in first, then the content. Don’t bury under piles of javascript & navigation stuff
  9. The cost of some sites using ‘traditional’ CMS can make you sob
  10. Security issues with WordPress? Can’t do ‘hard baked’ pages?
  11. Get Google Analytics and webmaster console
  12. If you are getting 90% traffic from search engines, that’s bad. About 60% is probably best.
  13. Gaming search engines gets harder as processor grunt increases. Don’t bother putting your black hat on.
  14. It takes time to get right, but can save a lot of marketing pennies
  15. Journalists are cheap – get them to write your content
  16. Can’t beat good writing
  17. Links: general directories are useless.
  18. Pimp yourself around: comment on related sites with link back to yours, put signposts up on relevant sites, be remarkable/stand out so people want to link to you
  19. Getting pageviews is fine, but to what end? You can generate traffic, but what do these people do when on your site except consume bandwidth
  20. Plenty of content, lots of key phrases
  21. 10% of traffic will have commercial intent
  22. Adsense is horrible (agreed!) If you are going to run ads use affiliate schemes
  23. The fundamental thing is that Google wants to find the sites that people want to see, so it really is just about the content
  24. SEOdigger.com – find out what keywords a site ranks for

WordPress 2.6 out now

The WordPress development blog has announced the release of a new version of the world’s best blogging software.

Some of the big improvements include: the ability to compare versions of posts, wiki-style, tracking who changed what – great for multi-user blogs; a new dynamic bookmarklet to help quick posting; the inclusion of Google Gears to speed up the admin interface; and new theme previews which include your content.

There is a video demonstrating the new version:

[HTML1]

Other, smaller changes include:

  • Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
  • Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
  • Bulk management of plugins.
  • A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
  • Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
  • Plugin update notification bubble.
  • Customizable default avatars.
  • You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
  • Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
  • Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
  • You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
  • Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
  • Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
  • You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
  • A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
  • Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
  • Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

That’s my morning sorted, then.

More online government innovation

There seems to be a head of steam being built up here, folks.

The Department for Innovation, University and Skills – who ought to be good at this stuff, really – has launched a new minisite called Innovation Nation : Interactive. It’s a consultation exercise around the Innovation Nation strategy, but is much more fun than the usual “here’s a PDF and an email address” approach. Here’s how they describe it themselves:

We’d like to hear your views and feedback on the Innovation Nation strategy that we published in March 2008, to help inform the implementation of the strategy. This is an interactive version of the Executive Summary of the document, where you can comment on each paragraph individually, or on sections as a whole.

It runs on WordPress (natch) and the CommentPress theme – one of a new breed of templates that change the way that sites work as well as the way they look. It’s a really nicely put together site.

Steph Gray, the blogging Social Media Manager at DIUS, puts it thus on his site:

In terms of the technology story, it’s amazing how CommentPress transforms a plain vanilla blogging format into such a dynamic tool for analysing a text, and just how easy it is to implement. Inspired by Glyn from Open Rights Group at a TeaCamp a while back, the site was put together in less than a day (though we’ve done less fancy customisation than ORG’s impressive implementation). The project is also one of the first public outings of our sandbox server, designed to be at arm’s length from the corporate site and with greater scope to test innovative tools and approaches online. Finally, we also used the excellent MailBuild email distribution system to help alert key stakeholders and contributors to the initial consultation about the new site via a branded email.

But we hope the bigger story will be the breaking down of the classic consult/deliver dichotomy which we’re challenging policy teams to overcome. We’d love this interactive document to become a place where policymakers, stakeholders and interested citizens come together to help move a policy forward, and we’ll be doing our best to act as a bridge between commenters and the civil servants who are working hard to change things. Don’t underestimate the scale of the cultural challenge here: we’re asking seasoned, busy public servants with a familiar way of working to take extra time and effort to make engagement a continuous process – and to do so in a whole new way.

I certainly encourage anyone with an interest in innovation in the public, private or third sectors to visit the site and leave constructive feedback where you can.

WordCamp UK

WordCamps are fairly unorganised events for lovers of the best blogging platform, like, eva: WordPress. The first one in the UK is taking place in Birmingham next month, and it’s going to be great. Get a ticket here.

Even better news is that Simon Dickson‘s going to be there, and running a session on non-blogging with WordPress. Simon’s also sponsoring the event, in his words:

It’s maybe unusual for a one-man company to sponsor a fairly large conference like this. But virtually everything Puffbox does at the moment is WordPress-based. It’s the content management platform I always dreamed of… and it’s free of charge. It’s time I gave something back.

Besides, it’s in Puffbox’s interests for this gathering to take place. It’ll be an enjoyable weekend of unashamed geekery. I’m hoping to meet some interesting people, learn some interesting things, and help create a support infrastructure for WordPress in the UK. A T-shirt with a big W on the front would be a bonus.

Well done him, a brilliant gesture, not least because Simon has already done more than anyone to progress the use of lightweight, low cost solutions like WordPress in UK government. I last saw Simon at the UK Gov barcamp aaaaaages ago, so will look forward to catching up with him – and a whole host of other top WordPress folk – at the WordCamp.

Load more posts!