If, however, you prefer the more traditional CAPTCHA, I can recommend this plug-in.

If you would like assistance with protecting your site from robot spam, Contact Us.

A useful comment would be something along the lines of, “I have received a great deal of positive feedback on my website by using the techniques recommended in this blog. My website’s typography looks much more professional and refined and my readers have commented that it make it easier to read. Another great resource I’ve found for typography is (website address.)” This is a comment I would approve. Even a negative comment such as, “I disagree. I think it’s ridiculous to spend that much time just making the typography look pretty – the readers come to my website for information, no to ooh and ah over a pretty website.” At least it’s an expression of opinion that is relevant to the topic and will, hopefully, generate more discussion.

Comments are resources for your blog. If the writer of the comment has typos or grammar errors, correct them before approving the post. Their errors would reflect badly on your own blog. Of course, you do not allow comments to appear on your blog until they have been reviewed – it is much too dangerous to allow people to add content to your website without your approval.

Blogs collect a lot of spam. There are filters such as Akismet (no longer free except for personal websites) or Mollom that help reduce it, but it is just a fact of life that blogging will include processing spam. Even if Akismet or Mollom don’t consider a comment to be spam, does it add value to your blog? You still have to do some manual filtering, though it will be much less than without the filter.

In this case, the design can – and definitely should – provide a list of fonts to use in decreasing order of desirability. This greatly enhances the possibility that the page will be rendered in an acceptable fashion, especially if one or more of the so-called web-safe fonts are included in the list. These are fonts that exist on the vast majority of computers – the nearly universal fonts such as arial, verdana, courier, and georgia. These fonts exist in one of just a few variations on pretty much every computer available, although the names may change between various operating systems.

There are work-arounds. Google fonts provide a much larger list of fonts available, but the fonts typically look a little odd. They’re just not presented well. In addition, there are some other services that will allow you to use fonts hosted on their servers. Most of these charge for that service. I can’t honestly speak to the quality of presentation because I haven’t tried them. Extensis and Font Agent Pro are the two dominant players in the field. If you have experience with these or similar services, please leave a comment, describing your experience with them.

Virtual Websource prefers to use the websafe fonts in more imaginative ways. By playing with the spacing, sizing, and other characteristics of the 15 or so web-safe fonts, a wide range of typographic presentations may be generated. An excellent resource for viewing and obtaining the style sheet control codes to generate those results may be viewed at TypeChart.com. Go view their displays and be prepared to be impressed.

For assistance in improving your website’s typography, Contact Us.

Virtual Websource recommends updating to the latest release of WordPress, primarily for security reasons but we believe you will enjoy the vastly improved dashboard as well. And media handling has been greatly improved.

As always, updating WordPress requires that you perform a complete backup of the database and all plugins. But you do backups at least weekly anyway, right? Right??

Prior to upgrading, ensure that all your plug-ins are compatible with the new release of WordPress.

To celebrate our new website launch, Virtual Websource is offering a WordPress Upgrade package for only $50 which includes full backup and plug-in evaluation. This special offer is for the month of January only. Contact Us today to take advantage of this offer.

Here is the list of our recommended plug-ins:

• Gravity Forms

  Not free, but very powerful. Certainly not always necessary. If you need only a simple contact form, use Contact Form 7 instead. But for long and/or complicated forms, you won’t find a better solution than Gravity Forms.

• Sociable

  Social media sites play a key role in promoting your presence on the web. This plug-in places links to your preferred social media sites so people can share your content on those sites.

• VaultPress

  Backups are essential and VaultPress provides the best backup for WordPress. Period.

• WordPress SEO by Yoast

  SEO (Search Engine Optimization) determines how easily people can find you on the internet. This plug-in stands at the top of the heap of SEO plug-ins. Yoast offers top-quality resources and advice on all things WordPress.

• W3 Total Cache

  WordPress generates html from a mixture of php code and its database. This takes time so your site will load somewhat slowly. Cache plug-ins resolve this in various ways, but W3 Total Cache claims our favorite spot. It builds the pages in advance, so the user just loads a simple quickly loaded html page.

Feel free to contact us about using these plug-ins on your site!

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