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Image by dgim-studio on Freepik
Image by dgim-studio on Freepik
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The Post – The Fundamental and Most Powerful Data Structure in WordPress!
Learning how to operate with posts in WordPress will allow your site to be built initially with little effort and to be dynamically displayed with no effort! Essentially, using posts strategically will reduce the maintenance on your site while providing the flexibility to add pages easily either dynamically or manually.
Categories are the one attribute that provide the muscle behind the post. A page of posts with the same category has a default layout. Sometimes this default layout is available within the theme. But the beauty of the post / category muscle is that all you have to do is define a new category, assign it to a few posts, and you have a new page without having to do anything except keep posting which is what most blogging site owners really want to do.
Using categories also helps increase SEO ratings.
Do you have a good strategy to exercise this powerful combination found in WordPress?
Let me give you an analysis of your site’s posts / blogs and categories to provide a better strategy that will allow pages to be created out of thin air on the fly, without you doing anything!
Do You Know Your Visitor?
Website visitors are quite the characters! And they are varied in their purposes for being on the site in the first place.
Many are there for a particular purpose. Most are there for the content and to gain some knowledge or information.
Depending on the site, some visitors are there to look at the pretty pictures, while others are there to associate a pretty picture to some content.
If you have a site, it’s because you have a particular purpose you’re trying to achieve. Most likely it is to provide some information or some product.
Why then would you need to have pictures of yourself on your site, unless of course you are the product, but most of the time, this is not the case.
Pictures help your visitors digest some of your content but only when the picture actually relates to the content text. Otherwise the picture is just eye candy and could interfere with the visitors achieving their purpose.
So what is the purpose of your site? What is the purpose of the pictures you’re selecting for the pages and content? Do the two purposes align with your visitor’s purpose for being there?
I contend that in the age of instant gratification, a site needs to align with the visitor’s purpose most. This should be the highest priority goal in the development and layout of the site. With that in mind, many site designs with beautiful headers at the top or with beautiful background images are pretty useless because the visitor must scroll just to get to the content. Or in the case of the background, the visitor must strain to get their focus on the content instead of the pretty picture.
I really get a kick out of seeing these news sites and the images they use with different news stories. Many times the image has nothing to do with the story. Other times the image presents a connotation that is different from that of the story. Remember the old black and white paper newspaper that was delivered to your door? It had headlines, but seldom had pictures because they were expensive to print. I’m advocating moving in that direction again. Unless a story needs a picture to help tell the story, why provide the picture? And I contend that if the story or content needs the picture, then perhaps the story is not being told very well. And if the picture is provided to assist the content, then it should be in a relative location of that content and not scrolled off the page as in the case of a header.
But the real question is what does your viewer want? If your statistics show that your visitors are leaving your pages after only staying 3 – 5 seconds and your site is loaded with pictures, my guess is they aren’t finding the content they want immediately.
The character of your visitors can be determined in the statistics and holding a visitor on your site longer will help your site achieve its purpose.
Let me look at your statistics and analyze what can be done to keep your visitors on your site longer.
Have Books? Will Sell!
Many of my clients want to sell their books. Then they send me all of these links to their individual writings, which I then have to integrate into their site. There is an easier way AND it
WILL EARN THE AUTHOR extra CASH!! Amazon Associates is Free!
One of the best ways to sell books is through Amazon. It’s the largest book retailer in the world, both for print and eBooks. If you’re an author who sells books on Amazon, there’s an easy way to pull your Amazon listings into your WordPress website.
If you’re not an author, you can still make money selling Amazon best sellers with an Amazon affiliate account. Amazon calls its affiliate program Amazon Associates, and it’s free to join.
If you’re an author you should also be an Amazon Associate. That way when you link to your book using your affiliate ID, you can get paid twice. For the book sale and the affiliate referral fee on the book sale.
The great thing about the Amazon Associates program is your referral link applies to whatever your referred visitor buys. So if someone follows your book link to Amazon and buys your book and a pair of shoes, you get the referral fee for the book and the shoes.
You’re even paid a referral fee for the shoes if they don’t buy your book.
So whether you’re an author or not, you can sell books on Amazon using your WordPress site. The company will pay dividends.
Then instead of adding links, I can add in a plugin that integrates with Amazon and adds my clients books and any other products they want to sell. Without the plugin however it is cumbersome.
So if you want to sell your books or any other product from a site being hosted here on Praise Worx, email me so that I can get you set up!
T&C test post
this is the form or the link to the T&C for
I can do better than this. See php notes from ChatGPT.
Fonts for future use
earth pulse - Kaushan Script yoga - Julius Sans One
Simple Event Plugin with Themify
The event post plugin that comes with the Pro version of Themify is great for posting and managing events that don’t require a calendar view or other sophisticated features. It does allow for recurring events, which is super! And using the Post Type Builder the page view of the Events can be modified to your liking. (Nope. This is not true. I need to ask for more details about this, but the default Events page does not appear to be accessible. It would have to be built using the PTB. But the event taxonomies are also not available. Better to build your own event type modeled after theirs and have all that.) But the real key missing element is there is no attendees list created.
I think EventPrime will give more bang for zero bucks.
Take a look here.
Taxonomies From Object Oriented Perspective
In the world of object oriented modeling, we look at the general case of an object and the characteristics that define that general case. We then define specific cases especially those which have different attributes or different behaviors from the general case, but that still meet the definition of the general case.
WordPress categories, tags and taxonomies fall into this realm very nicely. Taxonomies are the general case of a data type. The characteristics of a taxonomy is that it is a datatype to help describe the content of a post and that certain other posts will have content that is associated with the other posts. So one of the behaviors of the datatype of taxonomy is that it display all the posts that use a particular value of the taxonomy and that we can then manipulate the display based on that value. Every taxonomy has a name and may have child taxonomies.
So in WordPress, a category is a type of taxonomy. All the years that I have been using WordPress categories, I did not realize it was of a specific datatype called taxonomy. So category is one specific definition of a taxonomy.
Tags are another type of taxonomy. Again tags are datatypes (taxonomies) we associate with certain content to easily search on those posts containing that content. One of the main differences between tags and categories is that a tag does not necessarily describe the content but is instead used as an alert to other viewers who would be interested in that content. So while the content of a post may be talking about how the legal system is oppressive, the tag #christian would bring out this content to the viewer who wants to see content that would be of interest to a christian. This is not necessarily the only reason to use tags, but it is main one. The problem is we don’t know all the tags that exist today (and sometimes we accumulate many on our sites!), but with a little research, ingenuity and cleverness we can devise some that would eventually accomplish the goal of popping up in someone’s search results. Tags allow the posts which aren’t always in the same category to also be connected.
The beauty in the taxonomy class is the behavior associated with every one that is defined. Click on any taxonomy and you will instantly get a display of all other posts on the site that use that same taxonomy. This occurs both for tags and categories and subcategories. The problem is the website developer has to understand how the behavior works to use it effectively. And if you have subcategories, both the parent and the subcategory must be associated with a post if the post is to be included in the display of either the parent or the subcategory. Many site developers miss this and only check the box next to the subcategory forgetting the parent category. If the developer doesn’t want the parent to ever be displayed as a group of posts, then this is ok. But many shortsighted developers start with that limited scope and then later need to include the parent and don’t understand why the parent taxonomy has no posts. But with training and experience we can learn how to use taxonomies effectively to help in site flexibility and in site search optimization.
Today in WordPress we also have the ability to create additional taxonomies. Wow! How powerful is that?! Well it is very powerful for the website developer who has had trouble in the past of trying to deal with hierarchical and overlapping categories. For instance pet could be a category, dog, cat, horse, hampster, and rock could all be sub categories of the category pet. Then you may want to categorize by indoor or outdoor, or male or female. Yikes! Well this is where additional taxonomies come into play. Add to this that your site may also be displaying yard designs and have tables and classify them as indoor and outdoor. Now when someone using the power of taxonomies wants to display all posts associated with outdoor, they will get the outdoor tables and the outdoor pets! Oooops!! To alleviate that the developer has to define outdoor-tables and outdoor-pets separately. That works. The problem is that categories and tags are site defined, and selected by the post author.
But with the new definition of taxonomies we can assign certain taxonomies to specific types of posts. In other words we can create post defined categories; categories that are specific to a particular type of post. So a post about furniture will have the taxonomy of location assigned to it and given the value of outdoor. Then the pet posts would have a taxonomy of environment assigned to it and given the value of outdoor. Now when the viewer is reading a pet post and clicks on the outdoor taxonomy, only the pet posts with outdoor selected as the environment will be displayed. And when the post is being created, the author must first decide if this is a post about pets or a post about furniture, and the taxonomy will be associated with that particular type of post. So if the post is about pets, the author would add a new pet-post and if it was about furniture he would add a new furniture-post. Now the author can also post about pet furniture and specifically state if the furniture is best for outside or inside locations. Now only the taxonomies assigned to the specific post type would be available during the composition and editing of the post.
I don’t know when the WordPress developers first introduced this wonderful capability, but I’m glad they did. I just started using it along with the post-type builder in my favorite theme – Themify Parallax.
Hope this makes sense and was valuable. Leave me a comment if you have questions or like using taxonomies as well.
Eliminating Contact Forms
The idea of using a form to send an email to a site administrator is getting to be a little old fashioned. It was originally developed to provide more security from simply listing an email address on a page which invites spam to the email address listed.
PraiseWorx takes a different approach which provides an additional layer of privacy around the email address reducing the probability of spam. But this technique requires the viewer to have the default email client set up.
Huh?? Yes to some that’s a little too technical. So let’s explain.
The tool used to view email is simply referred to as the email client. This client can be embedded as part of a web page as is the case with Gmail, AOL, yahoo and protonmail. The client could also be a separate detached application running on the device (desktop computer, laptop or phone). If you can open your email without having an internet connection, that is a good sign the client is a separate detached application.
Setting up the default email client allows the email client to automatically be opened when an email address is clicked on if the email address is set up with the mailto: as the html protocol. In otherwords if the email address has this programming behind it. At Praiseworx we set up all email addresses this way. It is just the professional way to to things when building out web pages.
The biggest advantage to using your own email client to contact someone is that you (the viewer) now have your own record of the email, since it will be stored in your Sent mail box. And if you don’t get a response in a timely fashion from the recipient, you can easily resend it. The control is now in the senders (your) hands.
The assumed disadvantage to the website owner is that you (the viewer) have left taken your focus off of the website. At Praiseworx we don’t see this as a horrific disadvantage since the email will get to the website owner giving them the opportunity to continue the interaction. So it is still a win-win.
Here are the steps for setting up your email client:
Microsoft Computer: Windows 11
Mac Computer: Setting up default email client.
Iphone:
Other Phone:
Google Says I Need SSL Certificate?
Many domain registrars use this little trickery to get you to purchase something you don’t need. Let’s face it, the reality is a domain registration is the most important element of your digital presence, and the least expensive. With domains costing anywhere from $4 for first year and $12 – $50 per year after that, the domain registrar is getting the short end of the deal, with hosting costing anywhere from $100 – $300 per year, and on and on it goes.
So when there is an opportunity to upsell most companies do! And the SSL certificate is one place for website service providers to do that. So the domain registrar may sell you an inexpensive domain, or you may want one of the fancy domains and pay a premium price for it. Then they tell you as in the image above that in order to get a secure url you have to purchase an SSL certificate. This is false.
The url and the domain are separate and distinct entities in the digital world. The url includes your domain name and the url will designate if the website is secure or not. See that? The security is on the website, not the domain name! When set up properly a Google approved secure website beginning with https:// will not cost you a dime extra, not even a penny!
That’s why working with PraiseWorx you get total quality service as expected with no hidden fees! Your website will be set up with security built in without any additional cost, because we set it up correctly and automatically! Every website installed by PraiseWorx will have the Google approved https:// already built in.
If you want to avoid all the confusion, just let PraiseWorx handle everything for you, including the domain name registration. Then you don’t have to worry about the wolves in sheep clothes!
But if you like the challenge, go ahead and secure your domain name, but don’t pay for SSL certificate on the front end. You can in most cases get the security you need in the website installation.
Praise the Lord! Praise Worx!!