Author: Neil Matthews

This is a guest post by Melissa Burke, see Melissa’s full details at the base of the post

Regular WordPress bloggers can find it cumbersome to post updates on a daily basis, primarily because it involves more than writing a content piece and hitting the publish button; images need to be uploaded, titles have to be created and the posts need to be shared over social media.

Thankfully, the up-keep of the CMS is possible, courtesy of iPhone apps.

Many WordPress blog owners give a wide berth to the fact that applications offer an opportunity to carry out blogging related tasks and keep the site updated on the go. Some modern offerings even provide insights to audience engagement, social media analytics, latest stock images, news updates and more.

The following iOS apps will lighten your burden when it comes to posting regular updates on your WordPress blog, and also assist in making time for other commitments. Best of all, they won’t cost a penny to use.

Useful Apps For WordPress Bloggers

1. WordPress for iOS

It can be a daunting task to update WordPress from a mobile browser, but Automattic’s official WordPress iOS app provides a perfect solution to write and edit posts as well as moderate comments. You can add a self-hosted WordPress blog on installation, with your regular username, password and the domain name.

The app has a sidebar which lets you access stats, comments, pages, posts and other features inside the regular Dashboard. Selecting posts from the list will let you access all the published posts, while a new post can be created with the ‘+’. Simply put, the mobile version of the Dashboard is quite similar to the web version.

It’s compatible with media uploading, and there is an option to use limited bandwidth by choosing a small or a medium size of an image. As for the comments, you can swipe over any of them to approve, delete or mark as spam. The app was also recently updated for iOS 7, and now includes a theme selector and visual editor overhaul.

Download WordPress for iOS  https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/wordpress/id335703880

2. Circa

Keeping up with the latest happenings is important when it comes to generating new blog post ideas, especially when your blog mostly covers news in a particular niche. Circa presents news from reputable sources in a narrative that keeps the flow of the story on the small screen.

You can follow specific stories and configure the app to notify you when those stories are updated. The stories contain all the information as in traditional news pages, but they’re broken down into sections that make it easy for users to read.

The Circa editors present the whole scoop rather than just the summary, and they also leave sources to the original sources in case you want to visit the website directly. This app was also updated for iOS 7 and the new version i.e. 2.0 integrates full screen images and maps and a revamped design.

Download Circa 2.0 for iOS https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/circa-news/id517114354

3. HootSuite

The HootSuite app will let you stay connected with all social media accounts and share the published WordPress post links over different platforms from a single interface. The HootSuite Wizard gets you started upon installation, quickly organizing all the accounts for verification and importing of feeds.

For writing any post, you can tap the pen icon at the top right corner of the main interface, which includes icons to different social networks. Tapping on any of those icons checkmarks them and validates that the post would be shared over the highlighted networks.

Other options are for adding images and for scheduling a post for a specific time. Hootsuite was recently updated to iOS 7 and now features a new design for Apple’s latest OS.

Download Hootsuite for iOS https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/hootsuite-for-twitter/id341249709?mt=8

4. iStock Photo

Stock images have grown in importance in recent times, especially after the recent lawsuit cases against bloggers over using copyrighted images (http://bloglawblog.com/blog/?p=4292). Enter iStockPhoto; an app that can be used to browse a library of stock images, save and create new images on the go.

Existing users of the app based service can also check download stats and sales of uploaded images. All the files are accompanied by the number of views and downloads it has received, so it’s a great way to discover royalty-free images that can be possibly used on your blog.

And compared to ShutteStock, which has a fee to download royalty-free images, iStockPhoto from Getty Images is completely free to use.

Download iStockPhoto for iOS https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/istockphoto/id377716883?mt=8

These apps will significantly enhance productivity and keep your WordPress blog up and running when you’re away from the desktop.

Which apps do you use for WordPress related tasks? Feel free to leave comments.

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I’m a big believer in the Pareto Principle (The 80/20 Rule) which says that 20% of your effort brings you 80% of your results.  Learn why i think WordPress Is Classic 80/20

I think using WordPress is a classic case of this principle when developing a website.

If you spend 20% of your website design and development effort on selecting WordPress and using the community that surrounds it, you will get 80% of what is needed to build a website with minimum effort.

Web Design

You don;t need go be a graphical design guru to have an amazing looking WordPress site.

You don’t need to hire the same person described above and their expensive price tag.

All you need is a few tens of dollars investment in a great looking premium theme.  Install it and configure it and hey presto a cool looking site.  20% of effort goes on finding a theme rather than developing and designing it.

Web Development

If you have a functional need for your website, 9 times out of 10 there is a plugin to fix your problem.

Why code up a solution yourself when the WordPress community has already done it for you.  If you spend a little bit of effort researching and testing plugins it takes away the need to custom code for most website problems you will encounter.

 Training & Support

First up WordPress is pretty intuitive even to a none technical person.  If you can use a word processor you can add new content to a WordPress site.

There is a huge community out there supporting and supplying training ans support on WordPress, much of it completely free.

A quick google and you can find a training video on youtube or a support request which will solve your problem.

Because WordPress is so widely used, there is a good chance somone has created a documented soluttion to your problem.

Compatibility

This used to be a huge issue on the early days of the web, but since about 17% of the web is made of WordPress, everyone is clamouring to make their services and products compatible with WordPress not the other way around.

Future Proof

Ill not stick my neck out tooooo far, but I can say with a certain level of confidence that WordPress will be around for some time.

The investment you make in building a website on WordPress is not one that will disappear over night, it will return that time and money investment for years to come.

 What About The 80%

Ah, that’s where we come in, the 80% is where you need technical skills, know how to code in php or understand mysql.

Rather than tackling the 80% of effort that goes into build a wordpress site why not outsource it to us to do it for you and you have the best of both worlds.

We have a great range of WordPress maintenance packages or we can provide a quote for a one off project.

Wrap up – WordPress Is Classic 80/20

Checkout out our WordPress technical support page now for the tricky 80%.

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In this post I want to list the 9 things you should consider when developing your multi language

Why Are You Going Multilanguage?

Sometimes it’s a no brainer, you are forced to host multiple languages by local legislation, I know French Canadian provinces are forced to be bilingual, UK based government sites are obliged to host English and Welsh.

You may want to break into a new territory and need to support their local language, great but are people coming to your site from those countries already, are they consuming your content in the current languages?

I always suggest you dig into your analytics and see where people are coming from before you invest in multiple languages. I;ve written a post in this called Which Languages Do You Need.

It is not cheap to build and maintain a multi language site, do you really need multiple languages or will one do? Which leads me to …

Costs

You need to take into consideration the additional costs involved with multi language.

You will need translators to make your contents available (this is ongoing of course) specialist multi language web development {and potentially more powerful and costly hosting to deal with the bigger website.

These all costs more than a single language site.

Database

Will you current database config support multiple languages, in particular double character languages such as Chinese.  These are known to cause database problems if not configured correctly from the start.

I’ve worked on a number of projects where these characters don’t display and come up as a string of ?????????????? It is a real pain to reverse engineer a database setup,  do this at the outset,  before there is content.

Here’s a quick test, go to Google translate and select all languages you intend to support enter “hello world” in your current language and cut and paste all the translations into your current site.  Do they display, yes, then you are okay, if not you need to look at your database collation setup.

Performance

As you add the complexity of multiple languages you need to be sure your current website hosting has enough “oomph!”  to support multiple languages and all the coding required to switch between and maintain that content.

As you add a language, your site doubles I size overnight and most people go for multiple languages which means triples or quadruples your hosting requirement.

Design

This is a huge consideration most people never think about, they assume their current website design will work in foreign languages. I’m here to tell you that is not correct. Here are just some areas you need to consider:

• Design for expansive languages I’m thinking German in particular, your neat navigation design may not fit when you populate it in German
• Left to right / right to left languages, will your design work with Arabic or Hebrew when people read right to left, are your call to action buttons positioned optimally?
• Cultural differences, will you colour selection work in another country, are you using symbology that won’t work; Red Cross versus Red Crescent for Islamic countries.
• Have you designed a widget to allow site visitors to select their desired languages and is it obvious, there is no point creating a link that says Japanese when all they can read is 日本人.

Multi language design is a huge topic and I will be writing much more in future posts, but here are some great resources to get you started

• http://www.smartinsights.com/online-brand-strategy/international-marketing/web-design-for-cultural-differences/
• http://www.jatit.org/volumes/research-papers/Vol9No2/5Vol9No2.pdf ( a little dry and academic but great anyway)
• http://blog.usabilla.com/designing-for-a-cross-cultural-user-experience-part1/

Can you deal with multi language leads

You shiny new site starts generating leads from customers who don’t speak your native language can you fulfil their needs?

Do you have multi lingual customer support agents, are your products translated, can you handle emails in French?

If not it is very important to set customer expectations, personally I conduct all business in English even though I have translations and I spell that out to potential clients.

Ads And Banners And Downloads Oh My!

It’s not just your website copy you need to think about.  Have you translated the following:

• Are images containing text translated
• Are your downloadable PDFs translated
• Have you setup multiple languge ad banners and pay per click campaigns? Why spend money on a multi language site when you are not driving people there with ads in their own languages.

Ecommerce Multilingual Languages And Currency

If you are courteous enough to translate your site into multiple languages are you also going the final fews yards / metres to also offer your products in multiple currencies?

If you are making people feel confident in your products and services why not remove the final barrier to entry of exchange rates.

Last But By No Means Least Translations

Tell me you are not relying on Google translate!

Unless you have good in house language skills you are going to need a good translator.

Let me reiterate a good translator, having a couple of years of French at high school does not give you the skills to write business copy that converts. This is an investment you should look into.

Another thing to note is that subject matter skill are also crucial. If you have technical content can an everyday translator handle complex technical translation? As an example as a computer “techie” I might talk about object orientation, but would the translator think I’m talking about landscape versus portrait which is something completely different.

I sub contract all translation work to I CanLocalize, they have a large team of freelance translators, check them out.

Wrap Up

This was a very quick list post to highlight the issues you should be aware of before you start a multi language build.

I was thinking about running a free live webinar to go into more depth about these issues, if that is of interest let me know by leaving a comment if I get enough feedback I’ll run the live event.
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How To Stop Spam Registrations On WordPress

I’ve been contacted by clients a couple of times over the past month about spam user registrations on their sites.  This post will show  you how to stop spam registrations on WordPress in two seconds flat.

They are getting hundreds of spam user registrations on their site, and are seeing increasing amounts of spam comments. They then have to delete these users and the spam, it’s a time suck and pain for the site owner.  They are concerned this is some type of hack attack.

Here is a 2 second fix to stop spammers registering users on your site.

What They Do

The spammer will use scripts to search for sites that have open user registrations. Then using more scripts they add new users to your site.

You can check if  you site is open to user registrations by going to this URL

http://yoursite.com/wp-login.php?action=register

If registrations are open you will see:

If they are closed you will see:

Why Do They Do This

Some sites set their comments to auto approve from registered users, this means that spam links can be added to comments and made live without moderation.  This then increases people search engine rankings.

If you think this is an automated process you can see how thousands of links can be generated and rankings increased for suspect sites.

It’s not a malicious attack against your site, rather it is spammers trying ot game google and increase ranking for their shoddy wares.  It’s also a pain in the a!se to clean up spam registrations.

How To Close it Down

This is very, very technical, go to settings -> general and un-check this box

Unless you have a site that required registration for memberships or email plugins there is no real need to keep this open, please check with your plugin documentation to see if you need this to be enabled.

We are of course available to hire for this complex procedure

Please Tell Me It’s Not Set To Admin

I have seen certain WordPress sites that have registrations enabled and the default user setting are administrators.  This leaves your site wide open to hackers using the same techniques, and I have seen sites hacked because they have not closed this simple loophole.

Wrap Up

Unless you have a very real need to keep user registrations open I always recommend closing this function down to keep the spammers at bay.

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I get called in a lot to fixed hacked sites.  Here is An Open Letter To Hosting Companies Of Hacked Site Owners

I loath something almost as much as the hackers that perpetrated the crime and that is the way hosting companies treat people with hacked sites.

Here’s an open letter to all stroppy hosting companies out there from the point of view of a normal site owner who has been hacked.

Dear Hosting Company

Thank you for suspending my account after I was hacked,that is really helpful way to make me feel special. You are taking my site down, I’m losing business and you are making me feel like I’m the bad person.

I of course did not ask the hackers to attack my site so thank you for the threatening email saying you are going to kick me out if I don’t fix it immediately.

Thanks for making me jump through technical hoops so many times that I had to hire a techie to make things work again.

Thanks for the interrogation by your representative via Live Chat to make sure everything was fixed.  Perhaps you could have helped me to do this.  I have no idea what a .htpasswd file it or how to add basic authentication to my webroot.

I was a victim of a hack attack.,

It sucks.

I feel vulnerable

Some unknown fuckwit in cyber space came after me for whatever reason and defiled my site.

Thanks for making me feel even shittier with your emails and accusations.

Oh BTW it was probably due to your poor  security that the hacker gained access in the first place. Can I review the access logs, what do you mean no they are private.  Can you review the access logs and tell me how the hacker got in …… hello anyone there?

The majority of your customers are none technical.  They have a website to market their business or send news to their club.  They are not trained in the dark arts of cyber security.  They came to you to host their site with the understanding it would be secure.

Thanks again for making a bad situation of teh hack even worse.

Love and Hugs

Your Customer – remember the person that pays to keep the lights on

P.S. Can I have my transfer code so I can go somewhere my business will be appreciated.

An Open Letter To Hosting Companies Of Hacked Site Owners

Need help with your WordPress site get a no obligation quote.

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I work on-line 100% of the time. I never go on-site to fix client issues ( well there was that one time but I doubt I’ll get asked back, they didn’t like my penguin pjs). I’m very comfortable working like this and as a result I often lose site that other people are not as comfortable with this as I am.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking how I can bridge that e- gap and help people to feel comfortable working with me online without ever meeting me in person.

It’s A Balancing Act

I don’t have time to “jump on Skype” for a quick call with everyone who requests it, I’ve got clients to service and a team to manage. How can I create an environment of trust and still get my stuff done.

How To Create On-line Comfort

Here are some of the techniques I use to put people at their ease when working with me.

Testimonials

I’ve got a long list of real testimonials from my clients. I’ve added their contact details not just their names so people can reach out and contact my previous clients if they want.

I also use a testimonials plugins that allows me to add head shots linking real people to real client’s faces.

Check out this post “The Power Of the Testimonals” for more thinking about testimonials.

Case studies

I talked  a lot about case studies in my previous posts “The Power Of Case Studies” (wow must get less dramatic with my post naming convention) so I’ll not go into too much detail but having lots of case studies in your site proves you work with clients and that you are legitimate.

Guarantees

Provide guarantees in your sales pages, let people know you will do what you say or give people their money back. Here’s my
Guarantee

“If we cannot solve your problem, we also offer a no fix no fee guarantee and all money will be refunded”

And yes I have had to invoke the guarantee a couple of times, not every problem can be solved.

Don’t ask for too much too soon

Asking people to pull out  their credit card and pay up front for an expensive service to a complete stranger is going to be a hard sell. If someone comes to you cold and they see a credit card form that puts a barrier to entry up.

You won’t be asked for any money from me unless we have had a couple of email exchanges.

All I ask from my first exchange with a potential client are details of their problem and their contact details.

It’s like asking for a phone number of someone cute as opposed to asking for … well you know where I’m going with this.

Use A Payment Provider People Trust

Using some random provider over http does not inspire confidence like a provider such as Paypal.

People trust paypal and know they can lodge a complaint and get their money back.

Share The Risk

When I started this caper I used to bill upon completion, this was excellent and my clients loved the feeling of trust, that was until I was stiffed by a couple of scummy people and other clients would delay payments.

Nowadays I share the risk by asking for a deposit and then taking the final payment upon completion to satisfaction, this way we are sharing the financial risk.

Sometimes You gotta Skype

This is the real reason for this post.

Recently I was doing my normal thing raising quotes telling people about my no fix no fee guarantee, this potential ( now current) client commented that it was all too mechanical.

I’d not thought about it in that way this has been tried and tested process for nearly five years.

A five minute call created the feelings of trust and the project was green lighted, sometimes we need to create a physical connection.

I know I said at the top of the article that I don’t have time to jump on Skype with everyone but now I’m encouraging a quick pre-project Skype call with new clients to make sure they are happy working with me and that I’m a real legit business.

I’m doing this with people who are past the tyre kicking stage so I’m giving my time to real potential clients, again it’s a balancing act.

Other Things I Have Done Which Work

A couple of other things I’ve done in the past which work but I’m not doing now for various reasons are:

Talking Head Video

Talking into a video so people can hear your voice and see your face is a great way to make an online connection.  People like to look at faces and read body language.

I’ve disabled my talking head video while I split test some other items but I found it increased conversions a lot.

Have A Live Chat Box

Add a live chat box so people can ping you and speak to you real time.  This one didn’t really work for me due to time zones, too often people were pinging me from the US when I was offline inthe UK, but if you service local clients this is a great

Wrap Up

The take away point for this post is that you should be bending over backwards to put people at their ease.

Have I missed any tricks, what do you do to increase a feeling of confidence in your potential clients?

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