Tired of paying webmasters to update your site, or waiting days or weeks to get your site updated? Well you’re in luck because over the years technology has advanced to the point where you can easily update your own site, using a basic web browser. There’s no need to pay expensive, monthly fees to have your website updated, or wait for days or weeks to get your site updated by your webmaster.

I’ve recently come across an even more troubling problem. Webmasters that hold a website hostage, so you can’t get your domain or webhosts login information, effectively locking you out from the site and being at the webmaster’s mercy! Site owners have been trying to contact them for weeks and getting no answer! Another has paid thousands of dollars to have their site updated regularly and haven’t heard from the guy in weeks. I’m sorry but this makes me so upset to see clients getting screwed over so badly ,in this day and age especially.

We can migrate your site to WordPress (or create a new one if you don’t have a site), a simple, free software package offered by most web hosting companies that make updating your site a snap. Then any time you want you just login to your admin area using your favorite browser and make changes to your text, upload new images, PDFs, etc and click a button to publish. You’re site is instantly updated. No more editing HTML files and ftp’ing them to the web server, or getting a webmaster to do that.

With WordPress you can also save design costs (which are usually the biggest costs of a website design) because they have a variety of nice templates to choose from. Some can even be purchased for upwards of $50 depending on whether you can find a free template you like or have specific needs.

Please contact me to get started.

If you want to have a Tweet for Track or Tweet for Download functionality you could try the Cashmusic tool. If you’re not too technical and have trouble installing the php code and configuring it, you might want to use the ‘Tweet and Get It!‘ WordPress plugin, if you have WordPress for your existing..

Here’s an example:

To download the Kerry’s Jig Celtic rock mp3 just click the button below!

[tweegi-button name="KerrysJig"]

I recently saw this job posting for a WordPress plugin developer to create a plugin for a mortgage broker business. The idea is that a broker can update the status of a home sale without the realtor calling him all the time to check on the status of the financing and other tasks.

The instinct of many developers would be to create a plugin that would allow a broker to update a new database table called Listings, maybe another table for Statuses. The listing table would have the user id so that the broker could assign a listing to a specific realtor. Then create an admin area in WordPress so the broker can create and update the statuses (pending, complete, etc) as well as the listings. Hopefully they’ve decided to use the built-in login/registration feature of wordpress since the pages should be protected from public access (and other realtors).

I try to use the existing functionality wherever possible to avoid custom coding, which saves the client money and prevents the possibility of ongoing bugs as new code is limited. When you think of storing data somewhere you have a few choices – plugin options, page/post custom fields, the page/post itself, and comments for the most part. See if you can store the information you require in these areas before you consider new database tables.

If the data is global in nature related to your plugin then plugin options might make sense. For example a list of statuses, types of gamification points (XP, Like, Influence). Page custom fields might make sense if the data is related to a page or post. Comments will be less useful I’ve seen them used for a chat application plugin, since comments are already setup to be administered (approved, spam, etc).

In the case of our broker plugin we can store the updates in a page – typing in all the relevant information in the page itself, including file attachments, etc. Or we can add custom fields to the page with the task and related status (eg. financing – pending).

To protect the content we can use the Role Scoper plugin which allows you to protect a page for a specific user. This will also mean that the realtor will have to login to see the data which is a requirement. Most page protection is role based rather than user based so this plugin will help us a lot. We could put each realtor in his own role but this isn’t quite what we want as most roles aren’t specific to certain pages.

Another thing you might want to do is redirect each realtor to their own page(s). There are plugins such as Peter’s Redirect Plugin for that. Essentially this entire idea could be thought of as a Client Portal.

So the first question you should ask yourself or your developer is ‘Can we do this using built-in functionality and/or existing plugins?’ And think of how the data you need could be stored in existing WordPress tables, or secondly with an existing plugin. This will save you a lot of headache!

Please post your comments below, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

photo credit: rafeejewell

If you have a blog, you should make sure it is easily shareable. As a person who likes to share content on Twitter and other social networks, it’s amazing how many blogs don’t have this. So it requires me to cut and paste link as well as the title and then tweet it. Make it easy for your readers to share!

If you have WordPress this is pretty easy as there is a Facebook social plugin (and others). Facebook explains the Like button on their website. More and more actions around the web will be tied into social networking, what your friends like, are doing and even has e-commerce implications as 3rd party websites will know what you ‘like’. A very powerful trend that you need to be on top of.