The Brief

SolarBody is a tanning and beauty salon located on Melbourne’s favourite fashion, dining and lifestyle strip – Chapel Street South Yarra.

The original website was a static site – the owner was restricted by not being able to add any content herself.

Services Provided

• Setup of a Google Places listing
• Creation of a new WordPress website, installed on the existing domain,
• Selecting the most suitable base theme and customisation tailored to the business needs,
• Creation of a blog to allow the owner to write regular articles and feature the latest special offers,
• Migration of content from existing static site to WordPress,
• Integration of Mailchimp – Newsletter and Autoresponder service
• Search Engine Optimisation to enable the business to be found easily on Google when specific keywords were entered by potential customers

Have you noticed after publishing, when you look at your post, there seem to be some funny characters or extra line spacings or even changes in the size and type of font used?

The reason why this has happened is that other text editors add behind the scenes styling that is not visible to the general user. However, when you cut and past it into the post editor, it sees everything and displays these contradictory extra stylings, creating a funny looking post.

If you’re new to WordPress, you might just sigh and accept that it doesn’t quite look the way you want it to and leave it at that. Or if you’re a bit more advanced you may leave your visual editor and click on the HTML editor and notice there are extra tags that shouldn’t be there and start deleting the extra styling. That’s a very painful way of creating a neat, tidy, good looking post and if you continue that way, you’ll soon lose interest in writing and your blog will die a slow death.

How do you prevent this from happening in the future?

There just happens to be a really easy way to insert content you have typed in Word and you can do this while in the Visual editor, without even needing to look at the HTML editor or any code snippets.

1. Login in to your site via the WordPress admin
2. In “Posts”, click “Add New”
3. Type in the title of your post
4. Copy the text from your Word document
5. In the toolbar below the title, click on the icon that looks like a clipboard with a little “W” on it
6. Paste the copied text in the popup box that appears and click “insert”
7. And there you have it, your content pasted without any funny characters
8. Click publish and admire your great looking post.

Any questions? Leave a comment below and we’ll answer them as soon as we can. 

Here are the definitions found in the WordPress glossary of terms:

Category – Each post in WordPress is filed under a category. Thoughtful categorization allows posts to be grouped with others of similar content and aids in the navigation of a site.

Tag - A tag is a keyword which describes all or part of a Post. Think of it like a Category, but smaller in scope. A post may have several tags, many of which relate to it only peripherally. Like Categories, Tags are usually linked to a page which shows all posts having the same tag. Unlike Categories, Tags can be created on-the-fly, by simply typing them into the tag field.

Tags can also be displayed in “clouds” which show large numbers of Tags in various sizes, colors, etc. This allows for a sort of total perspective on the blog, allowing people to see the sort of things your blog is about most.

Many people confuse Tags and Categories, but the difference is easy: Categories generally don’t change often, while your Tags usually change with every Post.

To make this definition clearer for you, imagine your blog as if it were a book, think of the categories as chapters of the book and tags as terms in the index. Therefore, each post will belong to one category and may contain multiple tags.

Picturing categories as chapters gives you an excellent way to structure your blog – create a list of categories (like chapters) before you start writing in your blog and this then provides a broad framework to what your blog will be about.

Then with each post you write, you simply check the category you would like this post to belong to. You will find  the category list in the right hand sidebar of your edit post page. If while writing the post you feel you have missed a category, it’s easy to add a new one – simply click the +Add New Category link. Typically, each post will belong to one category (unless you have “featured” category to highlight certain posts like this blog does then it will appear in two categories).

Tags on the other hand can be added as you write each post – the “add tags” box is also in the right column of your edit post page. You can add as many tags as you like to your post. To know what type of tags to add, think of keywords that reflect the content of your post. Just like the index in a book where you search for a particular term and it will list all the pages where that term is mentioned, when a reader clicks on a tag word, it will take them to a page where all posts containing that word will be listed.

Ultimately, the best reason for the productive use of Categories and Tags is to enable your readers to find the content that best meets their search terms – this makes for happy and hopefully regular readers of your blog.

In WordPress, you can add, delete and edit categories by clicking Posts in the left sidebar of the dashboard, then clicking Categories in the sub menu that is displayed. This will give you a category creation form and display a list of your current categories.

1. Add New Category – Clicking this link will take you to an area where you can enter the details for the new category:
   • Name – This is the name that will appear in the above list, and in the categories list on your blog
   • Slug – This is what will be used to create links to your posts. It is generally the same as the Name, but can not contain any spaces (you don’t need to add anything here – it will auto-fill once you click ‘add category’).
   • Parent - Select from the dropdown list of existing categories to make this category a sub-category, or leave blank to create a top level category.
   • Description - This can be used to help remind you why you created this category and what you are planning to put in it. The text you enter here will only appear in the categories screen.
   • Remember to click the Add Category button at the bottom to actually create your new category.
2. Delete Category - You can delete a category by ticking the box next to the name of the category in the list and then clicking the Delete button.
3. Edit Category - You can change the details for a category by clicking on the category name in the list. This will take you to a screen similar to the add new category screen, except the existing details will already be filled in. Remember to click the Edit Category button at the bottom of the screen to ensure your changes are saved.
4. View Posts in Category - You can click on the number in the Posts column to see a list of all of the posts that are currently in that category.

Note – Sub-categories are displayed in the category list indented under the parent category.

I was doing some market research recently – asking questions about what makes a website a good site to visit.

The resounding answer was Content. Plain and simple.

If someone has come to your site looking for answers to a specific question, they will be looking in the content areas of your site to find the what they are looking for.

So in terms of usability, when you are creating your site, you want to make it as easy as possible for visitors to find the content they are looking for. They are not there to marvel over the “prettiness” of your site, or click on the multitude of advertisements you may have plastered over your site.

The best comment that came out of my market research regarding all of this was, “these fancy sites have been designed to impress other web designers and can sometimes make it hard to find what you are looking for”.

That one comment has completely shifted the way I am looking at websites now.

For example, one blog I subscribe to sent an email out telling me that they had updated the design of their site. Now while the design of the site is quirky and interesting, the content they had written didn’t really stand out visually from the background and I actually found it easier to read the email version (dark text on a white background) than the post on their actual site. The owner of the site said he loved the new design – a pity that this very design that he loves, may detract from the reading of the content he’s written.

It can be very tempting to spend inordinate amounts of time on the design of your website (or in discussions with your designer regarding your website), in the end, be aware that the content is what your visitor is there for and as such, you should be designing with your customer/visitor in mind – everything else is there to enhance the content.

Having said that though, an unattractive design may also deter your readers – so it’s important to find a good balance.

Here are my Top 5 tips for making your website more user-friendly:

1. Have a blog on your site and update it regularly

A blog on your site is the ideal way to be adding fresh content to your site. This makes your site more attractive to search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo) and it gives your customers (or potential customers) a reason to come back to your site.

A website built on a blogging engine like WordPress also allows you to not only have a blog that you can update regularly yourself, it also allows you to manage the content on the remainder of your site if you so choose (e.g. adding pages, adding or changing upcoming events etc).

If you already have a blog as part of your site – great – are you updating it regularly? The idea of a blog is to give your readers/customers a reason to come back and visit often, to keep you top of mind so that when they are ready to purchase what you have, they come to you first.

2. White (or light) background for content areas

While dark websites may look very striking, reading white text on a dark background tires the eyes very quickly – tired eyes means the reader wont finish reading what you’ve written and is likely to go elsewhere searching for answers.

3. Plenty of “white space” on your website

Similar to the previous point, “white space” gives the eyes a place to rest while reading and makes your site appear spacious, so make your site simple and reduce clutter. Keep in mind that “white space” doesn’t necessarily mean the space is the colour white, it could just be lighter coloured areas that are empty (no content).

4. Limited advertising banners

Sites that have ads in the header area, in sidebars and in between the paragraphs of the post (on a blog) are distracting and irritating. Your reader doesn’t want to be bombarded by advertisements catching their eye while reading your content. And if you have an abundance of adsense type advertisements because you think they will be a great income stream, it may be time to be a little more innovative in your online income earning endeavours. One idea may be to create your own information products or a membership site if applicable, with all your great content to provide real value for your readers in a way that ads never will.

5. Links to related content

This can be achieved in two ways: either links within your content that lead to related articles or “Related Posts” links that can appear in either your sidebar or at the end of a post. This makes your site/blog “sticky” – it gives readers the opportunity to dig deeper into your site and stay longer to read more about a topic they are interested in. There are widgets and plugins available that can add this valuable functionality to your site.

Now that you have these 5 tips to make your site user friendly, how does your website stack up?

If you don’t have a website or blog yet, start becoming aware of other sites you visit to see what attracts you and makes you want to stay and read, and what repels you. Then use this information in imagining and creating your site. Your new found awareness will help you, your designer and ultimately your reader. One great big happy circle.