Create an Awesome Home Business » Product & Site Reviews

Two More Plugins Bite the Dust Thanks to Thesis 1.7

Martin — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 04:59:00 +0000

Yes – my getting-rid-of-plugins crusade just got another boost, thanks to the latest version of Thesis.

Please note: I give you both the good and the bad in my reviews (including this one), but I’m an affiliate for Thesis and that means I will get some commission if you were to buy Thesis through the links on this page.

See my Disclosure for more details.

OK, so the focus in Thesis 1.7 is on SEO and site management.

SEO

The Thesis admin pages in the admin area have been re-organised and added to.

So you now have a Site Options page which used to be Thesis Options. It does the same things as Thesis Options, but it’s been extended to include a lot of SEO controls.

You also now have a Page Options screen which extends your SEO controls to Category and Tags pages.

Rather than try to write about these, I’ve made a quick video to show you around the new SEO features in the Site Options and Page Options pages:

Site Management

The Design Options and Custom File Editor pages are the same as before, but another addition is the Manage Options page.

I love this one because it enables me to export all the Thesis settings to an external file which I can store on my PC. I can then import these settings to another instance of Thesis 1.7.

I do Thesis customisation and implementation projects for people, and this feature means I no longer have to do the ‘on-site’ configuration steps whenever I deliver a new site to a customer.

I simply import the Thesis options from the development site that the client has already approved.

Also, using the SEO controls I referred to in the video above, I’ve configured my development sites to have the most effective SEO settings possible. So from now on I can ensure that every site I build for a customer is also fully optimised for the search engines – all pre-set in my development site.

Here’s a quick video tour of the Manage Options page:

Ugrading – How Did it Go?

I upgraded 5 sites the other day and 4 of them went without a hitch. But the 5th one threw up some problems:

For some reason the nav bar settings that were set up in Thesis 1.6 were not carried across to 1.7. The result was that the nav bar titles were all over the place and only 3 of the 6 pages actually appeared.

It was an easy enough fix – I just went to the Thesis Site Options page and re-set the settings in the ‘Pages’ section of the Navigation Menu.

The site in question is set up as a static site and I haven’t, therefore, given the home page a title. For some reason 1.7 freaked out at this and displayed an empty, half-width space on the Nav bar.

This, again, was pretty easily fixed by going into the ‘Home Link’ section and checking the box marked ‘Show Home Link in Nav Menu’ and accepting the default Home link text.

Easy enough fixes, both, but they shouldn’t have been necessary and didn’t arise on the other 4 sites I upgraded.

One more point: if you’re upgrading from Thesis 1.6 be sure to read the instructions for preserving your customisations, because they’re slightly different from before. Rather than simply uploading your saved Custom folder you now need to upload the contents of it.

Other than that the upgrades went without any hitches.

Summary

Overall, then this upgrade gives you a lot more control over the SEO elements on your site.

It completely removes the need for the All-in-one-SEO-Pack plugin (and Platinum SEO, Headspace, and other plugins that do the same). It also removes the need for the Robots-META plugin that I’d been using for a while.

However – a word of warning: if you’ve been using the All-in-one-SEO pack for a while and you deactivate it, all the Title, Description and Keywords tags on all your articles will be wiped out.

So, as much as I’d like to drop it from this site I can’t, because I’d then have to go through every single article and page and re-set all those tags – which I simply don’t have the time to do.

If you only have a few articles on your site then definitely I’d recommend making the changes and, for new sites, there’s absolutely no need to install any of those SEO plugins if you’re running Thesis 1.7.

Previous versions of Thesis introduced different areas of functionality and you can see the full scoop here:

Thesis 1.5

Thesis 1.6

If you’re new to Thesis and would like to give it a try, my special offer may help your decision – see my special offer on Thesis here.

And if you’re an old hand you can get Thesis here.

Questions on Thesis? Or on upgrading? Leave us a comment.

Cheers,

Yoono What? This is Brilliant

Martin — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 09:29:40 +0000

Quite by accident I discovered a cracking Twitter desktop application yesterday. But you can only use this if you’re on FireFox, because it’s a FireFox Addon.

I’ve tried a few different Twitter desktop applications in the past. All have had their good points and all have had drawbacks.

As a result, I’ve always ended up using the one that has the least drawbacks. And there’s always been something that frustrated me.

Not this time. At least, not so far.

Yesterday I discovered and added the Yoono Add-on to FireFox.

Although I only use it for Twitter, it also handles Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr, AIM, MSN and Gtalk.

So What’s All The Fuss About?

I love it for a number of reasons, all of which can be summed up in one phrase: efficiency improvement.

Once it’s installed it defaults to the expanded view:

From the top, this view tells me which account I’m viewing, gives me an update box, displays a row of icons for Updates, Friends, DM’s, Replies/Mentions, Lists and a Search Button.

Below that is the box to type in your search term and your currently saved searches. And finally comes the time-line for whichever view you choose to follow.

I’m following my WordPress Questions search in the screenshot above. So, as you can see, it’s telling me I have more than 999 updates in the Update view from people I’m following. Clicking the Updates button will display those tweets.

If I have unread DM’s or Replies/Mentions a count will appear beside each icon and I can click on the icon to respond.

So I have everything I need to know at a glance.

If you want to reply to a tweet, hover over it and three options appear: Reply, ReTweet and More.

Clicking the reply option brings up this screen:

Here I can type in my reply. If I want to add a link, I simply bring up the web page I want to share in the browser window and click the Share button.

On the web page in the browser window two options will appear, allowing me to share either the entire page or just portions of it.

Make your choice and the link is automatically shortened and inserted into the tweet.

How easy is that..!?

And finally, when I want to get on with some real work, I can collapse the Yoono window and I have my full browser window back again:

It automatically starts and logs in to Twitter (or whatever you’ve set up) when you fire up FireFox and it retains your settings from one PC to another (I’ve got it on both my laptop and my desktop). I’ve no idea how it does that, but I was impressed.

And the downsides?

In terms of its pure functionality I can honestly say I haven’t found anything that’s frustrating me yet. I know it’s early days, but it’s definitely the best Twitter desktop app I’ve used to date.

The only downside I’ve discovered is that when it’s doing its stuff (syncing with Twitter) it causes FireFox to momentarily pause. That means if you’re typing something your cursor will freeze for a second or so when Yoono syncs.

Not a big deal to me, and I’m getting used to it, but that may frustrate some people.

Anyone else using Yoono? Add your thoughts in a comment below.

Cheers,

Yet Another Review of the Third Tribe

Martin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:59:30 +0000

What do you do if you’re not making any money blogging and you don’t want to go down the cheesy ‘Yellow Highlight Brigade’ Internet Marketing route?

If that’s you, you may be a closet Third Triber. And here’s your opportunity to come out.

Affiliate Alert..! I’m an affiliate for the Third Tribe, which means that if you were to join the Third Tribe by clicking one of the links below I’d get some commission. Enough for a couple of beers, anyway.

The Third Tribe Marketing group was set up recently by some of the most successful people online:

Brian Clark (CopyBlogger, Thesis, Scribe)
Sonia Simone (CopyBlogger, Remarkable Marketing Blueprint)
Darren Rowse (Problogger, Digital Photography School)
Chris Brogan (Chris Brogan dot com, Social Media Super Hero)

This group represents a cross section of Internet Marketing business skills:

Blogging (Darren and Brian)
Marketing (Sonia and Brian)
Social Media (Chris)

And in its first few weeks of life the Third Tribe has attracted some other big online names. People like Leo Babauta, Johnny B Truant, Dave Navarro, Chris Pearson and a whole lot more.

This represents one of the biggest online gatherings of Internet Marketing knowledge and experience I know of.

And don’t think that, because of the names, this is too advanced for you. Absolutely not.

These guys are all approachable, interact in the forums and dispense their tips and advice freely.

If you’re early in your Internet Marketing career (like you’re just starting out) there’s not a better group to learn from. And if you’re an old hand you’ll still pick up gems from rubbing shoulders with this crowd.

Plus it’s a great (and easy) way to get to know (and become known by) some really big online names – just think of the leverage that can get you.

So what do you get as a member?

Education, and lots of it.

On how to build a successful, sustainable business online.

Every couple of weeks there’s a new recorded discussion (usually one to one and a half hours long) between one of the founders and a highly successful Internet Marketing entrepreneur.

They also run live Q and A sessions each month with at least one of the principals and sometimes a guest speaker. You can submit your questions ahead of time, or just join the call and chip in.

The most recent recorded discussion (at the time of writing) was a one and a half hour (90 minute) discussion between Sonia Simone and Brian Clark, where Brian explained the business model behind CopyBlogger. Why he started it, what his plans were, how he started making money from it and how he grew it into the multi-million dollar business it is today.

The information in these interviews is priceless, and you can listen to them over and over again, and get new nuggets each time.

You can also download the MP3′s or transcripts (which is what I usually do) to review in your own time.

Then there are the forums.

One of the biggest advantages of the Third Tribe forums is that after a new recorded discussion, or Q and A session, the conversation continues in the Forum. And whoever recorded the discussion joins in to clarify points and answer follow-on questions.

Forums are often the same wherever you go, but the involvement and interaction with these Internet Marketing heavy-weights affords you some wonderful insights.

And you get all levels of knowledge and experience – from absolute beginners to the old hands. That, in itself, is a differentiator for this forum.

The first two things awaiting new members are:

A quick start guide to making money online from Johnny B Truant
All the previously recorded discussions and Q & A calls – literally hours and hours of invaluable education in how to build a successful online business, from some of the most successful online business people today.

What about the downsides?

I think a number of people would like to have new content more frequently. So they would cite the low frequency of new content (new recorded discussions every week to 10 days, Q and A sessions once a month) as a negative.

My own view is that the depth of information in each of the new content packages, at least in those released so far, requires some time to absorb and implement. So this frequency doesn’t bug me.

Plus, as I mentioned above, you can continue the discussion (or ask clarification questions) in the forums after each new session.

I’ve read one particularly critical review of the Third Tribe, accusing it of merely being another site for teaching you how to blog, without a real product behind it.

It was the old cry about making money out of teaching people how to make money – but isn’t that what business school does!?

Another moan is that it offers no value to beginners.

It’s certainly true to say that Third Tribe does not give you any step-by-step, join-the-dots processes for making your first dollar online.

It’s not a keyword research school, it doesn’t go anywhere near PPC and it won’t teach you how to build a website.

If you’re looking for a ‘join the dots’ system along those lines, then the Third Tribe is not for you.

Instead, it assumes the smarts to take the information on offer, analyse it and apply it to your own business.

If you’re keen to interact with some of the most successful people online, and you’re willing to listen to their advice and work out how to apply it to your own business model, then this is definitely worth a look.

Plus you can meet like-minded people with whom you can collaborate in some way: put together a joint venture, guest post on new blogs or create some other kind of deal.

And if you do join, drop me a PM and let me know you came from here – I’d be delighted to help you settle in and show you around

Check it out here.

Cheers,

Wapple Architect – Mobilise Your WordPress Blog

Martin — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 14:10:50 +0000

Here was I, working away on my removing-plugins-crusade and I’ve blown it.

I just added one.

Actually, not really added – replaced. But I removed the one I’ve replaced a while ago, so it feels like adding.

This blog is now mobile-friendly again, thanks to the Wapple Architect.

I’d been using MobilePress to enable people using mobile devices to access my site, but a while ago I started getting a problem where my blog would freeze after I logged in.

I couldn’t do anything at all in the Admin screens, and it wasn’t available to normal viewers either. The only way to unfreeze it was to hit ‘Enter’ repeatedly until it generated a 500 server error (too many accesses).

Once the server error cleared everything was OK again.

Not scientific, I know, but it worked.

I went through a pretty laborious trouble shooting process and eventually disabled MobilePress. And since then I’ve had no problems.

That was a month ago and I was uncomfortable that I was no longer mobile-friendly. So I went in search of a new mobile solution.

There are a lots of them out there and I whittled them down to two: Mippin Mobiliser and Wapple Architect.

Mippin Mobiliser

My first choice was Mippin because it uses RSS to display your posts on a separate, mobile-friendly page. That appealed because, initially, I thought I wouldn’t have to add a plugin.

You open an account at Mippin, give it your RSS feed, and it will create a web page that displays your blog in mobile format. Quite neat.

There are some customisation options but they’re a bit limited and, although you can upload a logo, it’s limited to 120 X 30 pixels – not a lot. And no option to get your blog header up there.

None-the-less, the page layout (in mobile format) is good.

In order to automatically route mobile users to the Mippin version of your blog, however, it does require a plugin.

But it’s a pretty light one. It identifies that the browser accessing your blog is a mobile one and re-directs it to the Mippin version of your site.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get it to work.

It diverted mobile devices, but it sent them to a general Mippin page, not my Mippin page.

True, my blog was listed on the page it sent them to, but I didn’t want people to have to click another link to get to my blog. Too many barriers.

I contacted their support and they responded in less than a day (they’re based in UK and I’m based in Hong Kong so that will have had something to do with it).

But by then I’d dug around a bit more and found Wapple.

Wapple Architect

The Wapple solution is totally plugin driven – something I was initially hoping to avoid.

But, since Mippin was the only RSS based solution I’d found, I figured that if this site is to be mobile-friendly I have no choice but to use a plugin.

So installed Wapple and crossed my fingers.

I had to register, which gave me an API key. That allows me to access a whole range of settings – many more than were available on Mippin – and to manage my blog via my mobile device.

Plus, you get a custom stylesheet, and that enables you to create a layout and colour scheme on the mobile version of your blog that resembles the web version.

That’s really neat.

You can upload your original blog header and Wapple will scrunch it to fit the mobile screen it’s being viewed on.

It displays all the images your post contains, so my signature, which I put at the bottom of posts, shows up on the mobile version. And they’re clickable if you’ve linked them.

So all in all it’s highly functional and easy to set up.

There’s another bit of Wapple that I haven’t used yet: it enables you to mobilize your WordPress control panel.

I’m guessing this is probably pretty effective too, but I don’t use a mobile device to write posts, respond to comments and upgrade plugins etc, so I can’t give you any first hand impressions. If I did, though, this would probably be magic.

So yes – I’ve added a plugin. But this one is doing a great job and hasn’t caused me any problems, so I’m a happy bunny.

WordPress 2.9 – The Good and the Pointless

Martin — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 04:11:49 +0000

I hadn’t paid much attention to the previews of the new features to be introduced with WordPress 2.9.

But, having upgraded yesterday, I have to say that I’m left with mixed feelings.

I understand that there’s quite a lot that was designed to help plugin and theme developers, but for humble users (you and me) there’s some interesting goodies, one that didn’t work and a rather pointless one:

A piece of new functionality that should have made life better for us has been hidden away and made unnecessarily troublesome to access.

Let’s start with the good

Image Editor

WP 2.9 brought the introduction of a simple image editor that allows you to crop, flip, rotate or re-size images.

You can do this either as soon as you upload them or later by clicking the new ‘Edit Image’ button that now appears at the bottom right of images in your gallery.

I’ve always done any editing of my images before uploading them to WordPress, because I often add notations or comments to them, which the WordPress image editor doesn’t handle.

So I don’t see myself changing this process any time soon, but I can see that once an image is in WordPress and you realise you need to re-size it a bit more, this would be a quick and easy way of doing it.

The images need to be in your gallery for you to be able to edit them (rather obviously) and I mostly upload images to a folder outside of WordPress and link to them.

So this editor isn’t going to work for me anyway

Embedding Videos

(This one’s pretty cool – or should be)

No longer do you need to fiddle with embedding code, which often brings you into conflict with the WordPress HTML police if you try to format it.

You can now simply paste the URL of the video into your Visual view – which is how I tried to embed the video I’ve linked to below.

However, no matter what I tried I couldn’t get this to work. So I resorted to the tried and trusted method of embedding the source code into the HTML view.

A shame – that would have been neat.

Important: The auto embedding of videos is enabled by default but you need to visit the Settings>Media screen and insert the maximum embeddable size, just in case you can get it to work!

If you don’t and you embed a video that’s wider than your content column it’s all going to look like a bit of a mess.

Trash Can

They’ve modified the delete process (for everything – posts, comments, tags etc.) by adding a Trash Can. Instead of seeing the ‘delete’ option you now see ‘Trash’.

Items in the Trash Can will be permanently deleted after 30 days (much like Yahoo Email accounts).

Bulk Upgrade of Plugins

This is demonstrated in the video I’ve linked to below, so it must be there. But I missed it completely when I upgraded a rash of plugins this morning!

Still, from watching the video this enables you to select plugins for upgrading (to be super efficient you could go to the ‘Upgrade Available’ view and select all) and click ‘Upgrade’.

WordPress will upgrade them and check compatibility with your version. Neat – and I must look out for this next time I have some plugins to upgrade.

Canonical URLs

A new tag which is now automatically inserted into the HEAD area from 2.9 on is the Canonical URL tag. This is useful because it tells the search engines which is the primary link for your post.

And that’s important because posts on your blog can be accessed via a number of different links: tag archives, category archives, date archives and so on.

However, the All-in-one-SEO pack, Platinum SEO, Thesis and probably a few other tools, have all provided Canonical URL functionality for a while, and if you’re using WordPress with any of those you’ll now have 2 Canonical URL links in your HEAD section.

I don’t what, if any, impact that will have. But I’ll be watching.

Stuff that seems a bit pointless

Automatic Database Repairing

At first sight, telling you that Auto Database Repairing is a bit pointless seems unnecessarily downbeat.

But here’s why:

In order to activate it you have to add a line of code to your config.php file.

Now people who are on top of managing their databases don’t really need this functionality because they’re already doing it.

And the very people who should benefit from this (those who are not comfortable with this kind of stuff) are not likely to be comfortable fiddling around with bits of code in their config.php file.

Which means there’s a high likelihood they won’t activate it.

It can’t have been that much of a stretch to avoid the need for this by creating a menu item in the admin screens.

Still, maybe that will come with a later release.

OK – here’s a quick video tour of WordPress 2.9:

Leave us a comment with your reactions to WordPress 2.9, especially if you can get that video embedding thing to work!

Review of Thesis 1.6 for WordPress

Martin — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 04:35:14 +0000

I recently upgraded to Thesis 1.6 on three of my sites and installed it from new on a fourth. Here are my thoughts.

Firstly, just so you know, I’m an affiliate for Thesis. That means I get a bit of beer money if you end up buying it through my affiliate link (the Thesis links on this site).

I also use Thesis exclusively on my WordPress sites and I use it when I’m building sites for customers whenever they want design included with their WordPress package.

OK, on with the good stuff

I hesitate to call Thesis a theme, because it’s so much more.

It’s a platform that enables you to make full use of WordPress’ flexibility and, whether you’re a techie or not, it’s a wonderful WordPress design tool.

I reviewed Thesis 1.5 here where I talked about its SEO capabilities, among other things. Thesis’ SEO capabilities enable you to drop the All-in-one-SEO-pack or Platinum SEO plugins, and dropping plugins is always a good thing.

So what’s new in 1.6?

The biggie is drop down menus.

Plus, both navigation bar management and colour management are now done in the Design Options screen rather than the Custom CSS file.

The benefit is that it enables people who aren’t familiar with CSS to do a heck of a lot more with colours, layouts and the navigation bar than they could before.

Drop down menus.

The drop down menus are simply magic. All you need to do is set up your Parent/Child page hierarchy in WordPress and Thesis takes care of the rest.

Same goes for Categories, which you can include in the menu.

There’s really nothing more to say – it’s that simple. And just brilliant.

Colour management.

You can now manage the colours of various backgrounds (page, content and sidebar), text, links, the multimedia box, and your navigation bar from the Design Options screen. In fact the colours of every element you use on a page.

If you don’t know the colour hex code there’s even a colour palette from which you can select the colours you want.

So what was my experience of upgrading?

A word of caution here: if you’re upgrading from an earlier version of Thesis and you did a lot of colour and link customisation with the Custom CSS file, those customisations will over-ride colour settings you make in the new Design Options screen.

That means they’ll appear not to work.

So you have two options: either continue to do your customisation through the Custom CSS file, or wipe all those colour and link related customisations and start again.

Wiping and re-starting is not such a bad plan, because one of the benefits of the new Design Options screen is that you can greatly reduce the size of your Custom CSS file.

Plus, of course, it removes the chance of coding errors and the wasted hours searching for that missing semi-colon.

One thing that you’ll definitely need to change, no matter what, is your menu settings.

They’ve re-structured the coding for menus in 1.6 with the result that your old menu customisations will no longer work.

The new coding structure is much tidier and easier to work with, though, so if you prefer to style your menu through the custom stylesheet I think you’ll be pleased.

I did that on one of my sites and on a couple of others I blitzed the custom stylesheet settings and did all the navigation bar design through the Design Options screen.

It worked great and I just nipped into the custom stylesheet to adjust the font weight and font family.

The result, on that site, is that the menu now accounts for 1 line in my custom stylesheet, whereas it previously accounted for 11.

There are a couple of other nice touches in 1.6 too: you can remove all the borders separating the sidebars from the content area by unchecking a check box, and you can add a shadow effect to your content area by checking a check box.

Neat, both of those.

Chris has released a series of video tutorials for Thesis 1.6 and, as ever, the forum is extremely responsive and helpful.

If you’re interested in using Thesis I’m running a special offer you may like: you can find it here.

And if you’re happy to fly solo you can get Thesis here.

Wealthy Affiliate Platinum Review – Affiliate Marketing Training

Martin — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 02:57:35 +0000

When I was unemployed in 2000/2001 I just knew I should be able to make money with my computer – I just didn’t know how.

And whether you’re unemployed, recently retired or bored stiff with your job, I bet the thought has crossed your mind too. Well here’s some good news.

The Wealthy Affiliate Internet Marketing university has recently launched an updated version of its membership site.

This is the first membership site I joined, more than 3 years ago, when I first got into Internet Marketing.

The training and support it provided enabled me to develop my first profitable Google Adwords campaign and start making money online. Without Wealthy Affiliate, I probably wouldn’t be doing this today.

And full disclosure: I’m an affiliate for WA.

So what’s new, what’s good and what’s not so good?

What Wealthy Affiliate Offers

The strength of Wealthy Affiliate has always been the huge range of training that it offers.

Today there are 9 categories of training containing more than 350 training resources – PDF’s, Videos, Step-By-Step tutorials and so on. The categories are:

Pay Per Click Marketing (the area I started in)
Article Marketing
Search Engine Optimisation
Email Marketing
Research
Website development
Website Hosting
WA System Training
Miscellaneous.

In addition to the training resources, they offer website hosting (with one-click script installers), a website builder, domain name purchasing and a very active forum.

What that means is that if you’re brand new to Internet Marketing you could join Wealthy Affiliate and have everything you need to start and operate a business, all included within your membership fee.

And for a lot less than you’d pay if you bought everything individually.

So how has Wealthy Affiliate Platinum improved things?

What they’ve done with WA Platinum is to overhaul the underlying system to make the site more scalable, better organised and faster.

The only new content they’ve added at this stage is a getting started guide in each of those categories.

However, the rate at which new content can be added has now been speeded up, and there are a number of senior members (in addition to the site owners) who are continuously adding new content based on their experiences.

What are the strengths of Wealthy Affiliate?

The primary strength of Wealthy Affiliate is the range of training material available.

In addition to that, there’s a very active forum in which people are consistently helpful and free with advice and information.

As I mentioned earlier, the training materials and the support and guidance from Forum members enabled me to create my first profitable Google Adwords campaign.

What are Wealthy Affiliate’s not so good bits?

Although they offer web hosting and domain names you don’t get an awful lot of it. The number of email addresses, the hosting space and the number of one-click install scripts are less than you’d get with almost any dedicated hosting provider.

Additionally some of the scripts are out dated (WordPress, for example, is still version 2.0) so you do need to update them as soon as you install them.

But heck, for someone starting out you don’t need any more. And as soon as you find your feet and start making money as a result of the training on offer you can move to higher spec hosting.

Who would benefit most from Wealthy Affiliate Membership?

Beginners.

I can think of no other places where a beginner could become a member and get not only all the training they need but all the resources and equipment they need to start and run a successful Internet Marketing business.

Check out Wealthy Affiliate here.

Company Site With Integrated Blog: Which Platform?

Martin — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:14:40 +0000

Somebody on LinkedIn today asked what the best platform would be for a corporate site with seamless blog functionality.

No prizes for guessing what my answer was.

Right out of the box, WordPress offers the perfect solution for a company website that has standard product and service pages, plus the ability to release product news and updates in a blog format.

The Upside:

You can set it up in your root directory and direct visitors to a static page to start with – typically a home page introducing your company.

Then you can create static pages to cover product descriptions, catalogues, user guides, terms & conditions, etc – all the usual stuff.

You can use the Parent/Child functionality to break your product pages down into sub-categories. For example, a parent page could be ‘Cameras’ and different child pages could be set up for each type of camera.

Links to the pages will appear in your menu.

The blog area will appear in your menu as ‘Blog’.

You can use the blog functionality to post product updates, news items, news flashes or whatever – anything that’s time-sensitive. You can then link from blog articles to the relevant product page.

And the appearance will be completely seamless.

If you use your Categories and Tags effectively you can tie related blog articles together extremely well, making your site very intuitive and user-friendly.

Everything I’ve mentioned is standard, out-of-the-box WordPress functionality.

But there are also a ton of plugins that enable you to strengthen the search engine effectiveness, security and manageability of your site, as well as add almost any other functionality you want: a forum, a members area, or whatever you have in mind.

The downside:

WordPress does require some ongoing maintenance – but nothing more than you’d expect with a properly maintained company site.

There will be upgrades to the WordPress core code, the plugins and your theme (if you’re using a Premium theme). These happen regularly and you need to keep everything updated because these updates are often security related.

You should also make sure you do maintenance and backups regularly of both your system files and your database.

None of that is too onerous, but if you don’t want the hassle I can take care of it for you. More information here.

Update – 12 March, 2010:

I recently put up a site based on WordPress for my travel business. It’s designed as a static site with an integrated blog, exactly as I described above. So for an example of what I described you may want to take a look at this site.

At Last: A Twitter Desktop Application I Can Read

Martin — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 09:34:51 +0000

I’ve been using the Seesmic Twitter desktop application for a couple of weeks now and I like it.

Mostly because I can read its screen easily.

Its closest competitor is probably TweetDeck, which I reviewed here.

Seesmic and TweetDeck have a lot of similarities, but also some important differences.

Here are some thoughts on Seesmic.

As with TweetDeck, on Seesmic you can define different columns (or panes) and arrange how they’re displaid on your screen. I have columns set up for the search that I run each day, replies and a group of friends who I follow more closely.

Some Seesmic features that I like:

You can enter your Bit.ly or other link-shrinking account details, and Seesmic will automatically add new links that you tweet to your link-shrinker account so you can track clicks and activity on them
You can click on 4 main options (Home, Replies, Private and Sent) and see the timeline in the left hand column. You can also separate any of these columns so that they’re permanently displaid. I particularly liked that you can view Sent tweets easily.
The black text on a white background is MUCH easier to read than the User Interface on TweetDeck and Destroy Twitter – at least for me with my ageing eyes

Some things I don’t like:

It doesn’t recognise and suppress tweets that you’ve read. So each time I log on I see all my past replies, search results and all messages in my Friends group, even if I’ve already read and cleared them. That means that I have to try to recall which ones I’ve replied to and that’s a pain.
It also doesn’t mark tweets you’ve read within your session. Irritating if you’re interrupted by a phone call, for example, because you have to glance through each tweet to find the last one you read.
It doesn’t display the history of a tweet conversation within the application. If you click the ‘In reply to xxxx’ it fires up your browser and takes you to the Twitter web page with your tweet. Displaying the sequence of tweets within the application is one of my favourite things about Destroy Twitter.
It’s not as intuitive as either TweetDeck or Destroy Twitter. I was getting quite frustrated trying to set up a Friends group and I can’t add friends unless I can see a tweet from them.

But overall it’s the Twitter desktop app that I’m using by default now – because it is SO much easier to read than either TweetDeck or Destroy Twitter.

It runs on Adobe Air, so you can run it on either Macs or PCs.

A Review of Thesis 1.5 – The Official Release

Martin — Mon, 04 May 2009 12:06:27 +0000

I upgraded to the official release of Thesis 1.5 over the weekend – here are some thoughts.

Full disclosure up front: I’m an affiliate for Thesis.

The official release of Thesis 1.5 must have been one of the longest drawn out sagas of any recent major product upgrade – there were seven (yes 7!) 1.5 beta releases!

To be sure, the first 1.5 beta release generated several howls of protest because, for quite a few people, things basically went haywire.

Looking back, that release should probably have been an alpha release.

But there’s no escaping the fact that 1.5 is a big jump forward from 1.4.2, as I’ll cover in more detail later, and that probably also contributed to the early problems.

Further, one of the early issues appeared to be caused by the database encoding used by the Fantastico 1-click WordPress installation script – Latin, rather than the UTF-8 that’s the WordPress recommended encoding.

However, things are all sorted out now and Thesis 1.5 is the official current release.

So what’s new, and what’s the impact?

As I mentioned earlier, there’s a lot that’s new in 1.5:

Firstly, let’s look at the SEO features:

Thesis has always been very effective in the SEO stakes, but there are quite a lot of new features in 1.5 that pretty much enable you to drop a number of SEO related plugins.

For example:

You can now selectively add ‘noindex’ to your archive pages (tag, category, month, year, author, etc)
You can get Thesis to add the Canonical url tag to posts
In the post/page write screens you can add META descriptions, keywords and titles for each new article.
Again in the post/page write screen you can specify ‘noindex’ for that particular article if you want.
You can specify home page META description and keywords (META titles are handled by WordPress for your home page)

SEO-wise that replicates a lot of the functionality of the All-in-one-SEO pack plugin and some of the functionality of the Robots-META plugin – not bad for a theme.

Next let’s look at layout:

Thesis layout options have always been one of its stronger features. This has now been strengthened even further:

You can now:

Specify individual column widths for any of the column layout options (3, 2, or 1 columns).
Select a Teasers & Features (Magazine style) layout or a traditional blog layout
Specify the headings to be displayed in your Teasers & Features layout – e.g. author name, date, category, etc
Specify date format and font sizes for your Teasers boxes, which can be different from your main posts.
Specify the width of whitespace that surrounds your content (or eliminate it if you want to).

Those are some pretty powerful features and enable you to completely change the layout of your blog simply by selecting different options and hitting the ‘Big Ass Save Button’.

Next, the navigation menu:

A long time characteristic of WordPress nav menus has been that, by default, it uses your page title as the menu item title – which can take up a lot of space.

Also, managing the order in which items appear on the menu bar has always been (in WordPress’ own words) klanky.

With Thesis 1.5 you can now:

Select which pages you want to appear in your menu bar
Edit the title of each menu item
Change the order of each item by simply grabbing and dragging it
Include Categories as items in your menu bar

Again – all by just selecting options.

Finally, under the hood:

This part is not immediately obvious, but the architecture of Thesis 1.5 has been completely re-written to make it far more efficient. It’s also supposed to be easier to upgrade. So I understand, anyway, but I guess we’ll see at the next release!

This has apparently been achieved by designing things so that Thesis makes far fewer calls to the server now than it did before.

I’m sure that’s exactly what they’ve done – but it’s not something I’m in anyway qualified to make any sort of comment on.

What I can tell you is that my blog and posts load noticeably more quickly now, and that’s something I care (and am very pleased) about.

OK, those items I’ve covered above are the new options that you can select from the Thesis control panels. I’ve not covered the functions that were already there.

In addition to those, you still have the custom CSS file and the custom-functions file.

The custom CSS file enables you to make any changes you want to styling, over and above what you can select through the control panels. It does this without touching the core CSS files, so if you mess up you can just delete your creation and start again.

The custom-functions file enables you to make use of hooks to move different elements of your page around, pretty much without limit.

The custom-functions file does require that you get to grips with hooks, but you do have an alternative: Rick Beckman, one of the Thesis developers, has released a plugin that makes managing hooks a complete doddle. I reviewed it here.

So what was my experience with upgrading?

Generally pretty good, although one or two little surprises needed dealing with:

Firstly:

I had to fiddle with the column widths for each of my columns to get things back into place.

I noticed a couple of things that went awry:

1) The width of my main content column changed and that resulted in some elements on some of my pages breaking into the sidebars.

2) The overall width of the content area changed slightly and that resulted in my header graphic looking a bit untidy as it started to repeat itself at each end.

10 minutes fiddling around with the individual column widths got things back to where they should have been.

Secondly:

My contact form plugin (cforms11) took on a mind of its own.

The first thing I noticed was that it changed the alignment of some of its elements. When I tried to change them back it completely ignored my updates and other things started to go awry.

I tried re-installing it, without success. In fact, it lost all styling at that point and refused all of my pleas to behave.

So I removed it and set up a workaround.

I don’t know for sure whether this is a clash with Thesis or some other issue.

I’m going to try re-installing cforms11 from scratch on my development site to see whether I can get it to work properly.

But I think I prefer the workaround I came up with anyway, so I won’t be too fussed if it doesn’t work.

However, if you’re using cforms11 this will be something to watch out for.

Apart from that, the upgrade was smooth.

After unzipping the files I copied the custom folder from my Thesis 1.4.2 installation down to the Thesis 1.5 folder on my PC. That ensured that all the customizations I’d done in the custom CSS and custom-functions files were copied into the 1.5 folder.

I then uploaded the 1.5 folder, activated it from the themes page, went into the Thesis Options and Design Options pages and hit the ‘Big Ass Save’ button, and that was it.

Except for the glitches I mentioned above.

Thesis is now more than a theme. It’s a platform that enables you to maximize the power of WordPress without the need for coding skills.

If you’re on an earlier version of Thesis, should you upgrade? Definitely.

And if you’ve not used Thesis yet should you give it a try? Double definitely.

You can Find Thesis Here.

I’m currently offering free installation and customisation of Thesis if you’re interested in using it. For details click here.