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Have you recently updated WordPress and then noticed that your post area looks blank when you edit existing posts or pages?

I noticed this after going through the hassle of upgrading to WordPress 3.3.1, and manifests itself as white text being displayed on a white background when your post edit page loads. You might also find that switching between ‘Visual’ and ‘HTML’ modes doesn’t work either, and the wysiwyg icons don’t display.

Having looked through loads of forums and support groups, with various suggestions such as uploading the WordPress files again, clearing cache, and switching off plugins, I came across a random suggestion that has appeared to fix the ‘white text on white background’ problem for me.

Try installing the Use Google Libraries plugin, then clear your browser cache and try again. If this works for you then it suggest a problem with one of the WordPress libraries or files in your install, as the plugin will go off to Google’s libraries to get the files it needs instead. This could also improve the performance of your site too, as you will be making use of Google’s content delivery network and it’ll reduce the load on your server too.

WordPress post edit area is blank (displays white text on white background) is another great post from: DMJ Computer Services

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Are you wondering whether it is best to host your blog alongside your main website, or whether to use one of the standard blogging platforms such as WordPress.com, Blogger and TypePad?

Although personal (non-business-related) blogs are perhaps best kept away from your main business website, I think there is a very strong case for integrating a business-related blog into your main business website. Here’s a few reasons why…

1. Consistent and more professional – your site will be properly branded for your business, whereas external blogging sites (such as Blogger) may not. This is akin to publishing generic email accounts (hotmail.com etc) for your business email
2. Visitor retention – keeping visitors on your site : your site should really be the hub, the focal point for your online business conversions, so why would you actively drive visitors away from it to read your blog content?
3. Search engines – The external blog site would rarely have the same search engine clout as your own website. Search engines like sites that are authoritative, content rich, and active! If you put all your blog posts on an external site, how active is your main site going to be?
4. Search engines have more content to work with, and they are more likely to see a connection between your main site content and blog content if it is contained in the same place – increasing your relevance
5. Credibility – It shows your business is not just choosing the nearest free platform to host a blog, but has invested time and effort into integrating the blog into your main site. It’s not that difficult these days to set a blogging platform such as WordPress up to run on your website, and you can customise so that your main website and blog really do appear to be integrated
6. Freshness – It is more likely to showcase your website as an active site to potential new clients. How often have you been to a website that looks smart enough, but where it has clearly been several years since the content was changed?
7. Convenience – why go off to a separate website to maintain your blog when you can access all of your content in one area? It might also encourage you to edit your main website pages a little more often to keep them fresh too!
8. Portability – it’s much easier to move your website content to a different domain, or to change the structure of your site, if you don’t have to also change all the inbound links that you have placed in your blog(s) (although 310 permanent redirects could be used here)
9. Recoverability – keeping all your content in one place makes it easier to backup and, if you need to, restore the content. Are you backing up your blog content? No? How would you be affected if it was suddenly lost?
10. Styling – you can make your blog content even more attractive by styling it as you want and by using widgets to add site functionality. You’ll also be able to carry the branding and advertising that suits you, and not that which suits your blog provider
11. Profit – in the event that your content becomes highly reputable and delivers lots of traffic, you might want to sell it on to an interested party. This is much easier to achieve if the site is yours and you own all the rights to the content

Top reasons to host your blog on your website is another great post from: DMJ Computer Services

According to Quantcast, the website audience measurement company, wordpress.com is now the 19th most popular site for US visitors.

As a measure of the growth of WordPress this is remarkable in itself, but don’t forget this doesn’t include all the sites that are self-hosted. Any way you look at it, a huge proportion of internet traffic is landing on a WordPress page somewhere in the World, and it looks like the trend is for this to grow further as more businesses start to realise that WordPress is a credible web development platform.

WordPress.com actually ranks number 1 in the UK, but the UK figures only include websites that Quantcast has ‘quantified’, so it is not as reliable a measure as the US ones.

Take a look at the WordPress stats on the Quantcast site.

Should I have a WordPress website too?

Probably!

Most of the websites we build are WordPress sites these days. The power and flexibility of the framework means there is very little that cannot be achieved, and the fact that WordPress powers 14% of the World’s Top 1 million websites should be proof enough that it can scale, if required.

We are WordPress experts, and will deliver a website that works for you. Contact us and join the revolution today!

WordPress.com attracts 200 million visitors a month is another great post from: DMJ Computer Services

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WordPress is now being used to power 14.7% of the top 1 million websites in the World, and 22% of all new domain names active in the US are wordpress sites. Downing Street run the Number 10 website on the WordPress framework.

Incredibly, up until a few years ago, only 5% of WordPress users were using it as a CMS. That is to say, 95% were using WordPress just as a blogging tool and not using it to actually manage the content on their websites. In 2011, this figure has risen to around 92% – so 92% of WordPress users are now using it to control the content on their sites.

The bulk of my own clients are now on WordPress-based websites. It’s no longer a platform just for blogging – it’s a full content-management solution that even the largest corporates are using now.

See the full State of the Word address by WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg.

“So easy, a caveman can do it”

Do you have a WordPress website? You’re not alone… is another great post from: DMJ Computer Services

This is really useful, but the overhead in your WP database can get quite high if you frequently edit posts and pages, as there is no automatic culling of revisions built in to a WordPress install.

There are a few ways you can keep the number of revisions in check. The way I prefer is to edit your config.php file to include the following couple of lines…

Reducing the number of WordPress Revisions is another great post from: DMJ Computer Services

Have you discovered Google Web Fonts yet?

This is a library of fonts, suitable for using on your website, that are available under an open source licence and stored on and accessed from google web servers. So they are fonts you don’t need to pay for!

The possibilities for your website are great. There is a wide range of fonts available, and they are easy to install.

Google Web Fonts Previewer for Chrome

I have installed the font previewer for Chrome, which enables me to quickly and easily test out how each of my web pages will look with a number of different web fonts. Once I have decided on a font, the previewer then provides the code needed to slip into your website. Once the code is added to your site, that’s it – your new web font will be live on your site!

The website you are looking at right now is using the Amaranth font. I’m going to be trying some others out on my other websites.

Adding Web Fonts to WordPress

To get the font installed in your WordPress site, just edit your header.php file and insert the code into the <head>…</head> section of the script (or into your child theme if you have one, just so that it isn’t overwritten the next time you upgrade your theme) unless your theme supports them directly. Don’t forget to back it up first though – just in case

If you want to use different fonts for different elements of your site (for example if you want headings in one font and the main text in another, or a special font to display your testimonials in a hand-written style), then you’ll probably want to action that through your CSS.

Let me know what you think. I can help out if you get stuck.

Google Web Fonts for your WordPress Site is another great post from: DMJ Computer Services

I have had a couple of questions from people recently that have gone along the lines….

I want to build my own blog, so I went to the WordPress site and downloaded the software but am now completely confused – how do I install and run it?

Each of these people had got so far with the install and then hit a brick wall. The reason was the same for both… Google! (on reflection that’s perhaps a little harsh)

A quick recap (most of you will already know this)….

There are essentially 3 ways to use WordPress :

1. Create and run your blog on the wordpress website

This is a great way to try WP out – it is quick and easy, and is free (check out the free WordPress features here) unless you want to do more complex things with it. To take this option just go to wordpress.com and sign-up and you could be running your own blog in minutes!

2. Install WordPress on your own (or a hosted) web server

If you really want to experience the power of WordPress then this is the way. You have complete control over the installation and can either install it alongside an existing website that you have running on the server, for example as an integrated blog, or you can run it as the website itself. Either way, and not withstanding external costs such as hosting etc., this is totally free and available from wordpress.org!

3. Install WordPress on your personal computer

For those who would like to run a personal version of WordPress just for themselves without putting it onto the worldwide web, or for those who want an offline development environment, this is the approach you might take. I say ‘might’ because with each of the above 2 solutions you can still have a test site or a private blog and so there is generally little reason to install locally. In addition, it is generally the hardest of the 3 solutions to implement (as you will probably need a WAMP – Windows / Apache / MySql / Php) plus a little technical knowledge, as well as some patience, and yet…. this is what both of the people who questioned me had done. Why?

I think that the answer lies in the way they went about finding and downloading WordPress.

The first option is available through wordpress.com, but the other 2 require downloads from wordpress.org. The difference between options 2 and 3 are that with option 2 you need to upload the downloaded software to your web host whereas for option 3 it just stays on your computer.

Now, if you search Google for the term ‘WordPress’ the .org site comes top with the .com site close behind. The .org site also has lots of google sitelinks against the entry and so immediately looks more appropriate. It’s logical that people will click this link in preference to the .com one. If they have a web host in mind and know about ftp then they will probably be ok, but if not they are likely to end up with a whole load of code on their computer that they have no idea what to do with.

What Recommendations do I have for those who want to install WordPress themselves?

Well, I’m a WordPress user with some experience and I run a website development company, so my first recommendation could be to let me sort it out for them to deliver the solution they really want, but if they really want to have a go themselves….

1. Try it out at wordpress.com first – it could save you a lot of time and expense if you find out it doesn’t do what you thought it would!
2. If you want it to go public and want to have your own domain name – you could still try wordpress.com (premium) or you could look at one of the many low-cost hosting solutions that either have WordPress pre-installed for you or one which allows you to install WordPress directly from your hosting control panel
3. If you have ftp access to your web server and you can’t get it pre-installed on your server, then download WordPress from wordpress.org and then use your ftp program (e.g. Filezilla) to upload WP to your web server. Important Note : Your web server will need to allow you to run MySql and PHP. Most do these days, but don’t go buying webspace without checking first.
4. If you are determined to run WordPress on your own local computer, then you should read a few of the many guides to installing WAMPs.

Once you have the software uploaded (or downloaded, if you just want to run it on your computer) you can then follow the Famous 5 minute install available.

Best ways to install WordPress is another great post from: DMJ Computer Services

After a bit of searching to find an answer I came across a simple plugin, called ‘Missed Schedule’, which will periodically run through your posts and publish anything that has gone past its scheduled date. I installed the plugin and it immediately published my problem post.

A word of warning though – the plugin disables cron jobs native in WordPress. You can comment this line out of the plugin code, but if you’re not too sure about doing that why don’t you just do what I did and deactivate the plugin when you don’t need it?

You can find the Missed Schedule plugin here.

My WordPress scheduled post didn't publish on time is another great post from: DMJ Computer Services

Whilst these books are functionally and practically really no better than a well-designed website image gallery, and take a little putting together to make look really effective, they can be really impressive and offer website visitors something a little more interesting than the normal content. For example, they could be used to make your holiday rental property guestbook available online so that your web visitors get to see the real words written by your guests in their own handwriting (see our example on the right). Whilst this can be fiddly to put together, and time consuming to keep scanning and uploading more pages as they change, it can be an effective tool in persuading your visitors that they are real testimonials.

Have a play with the example on the right – you need to click the image then, once the book pops up, you can page through it by clicking the bottom corners of each page, or by using the navigation, or by double-clicking on the page to turn it.

We like it and can see a number of possibilities to use this to make some of our own content more appealing, as well as for our clients (e.g. brochures, newsletters etc. and anything where you want to give your customers the opportunity of saving the planet by providing an online version of your printed materials – if your website doesn’t already do this!).

We did come across a few glitches when installing, configuring and using the flippingbook plugin, the most confusing of which was having to change the file attributes of some of the images in the gallery to at least ’644′ before the book would display its contents.

What do you use it for? Can you see a use for it on your website? Get in touch and ask us to help.

Problems with WordPress' Flipping Book plugin? is another great post from: DMJ Computer Services

Then comes the cold slap of reality, that cold kipper round the face (see example on right).

These aren’t comments from people that have something real and insightful to say about your post. It’s SPAM – verbal diarrhea, garbage, provided by those whose only interest is in writing a completely irrelevant comment in the hope that it generates traffic and link juice for their own web page. This is usually a pointless exercise anyway – as nobody will read the comment and think “ah, that sounds interesting, I’ll just click through and find out more” and there will generally be no link juice to be gained because the page will either not be valuable enough to have any in the first place, or the site owner would have instructed search engines not to pay attention to these links (see earlier post on using nofollow on your web pages).

But – these comments can still be rather disruptive to your blog, as they will devalue your content if left in place and can be time consuming for the blog owner to keep removing manually. Akismet is a plugin that all WordPress site owners can use (free for non-commercial use) to trap spam comments and bin them before they spoil your blog. You can review the comments it traps before deleting them for good, and you can set it so that all trapped comments are automatically deleted after a month.

So if spam is still spoiling your blog, take a look at Akismet and make it a problem of the past.

You are handling your WordPress spam, aren’t you? is another great post from: DMJ Computer Services