Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

• Sponsors
• Billing Options
• Content Providers
• Web Hosting
• Traffic Counters
• Website Designers
• Resource Sites

Well I've just spent an hour trying to do something in Google + and do you think I could achieve my goal? Of course not!

It was nothing terribly involved but for some reason I am just not finding Google + all that easy to use. But then that's about par for the course with anything new that Google releases ... they seem to employ a group of drunken monkeys as their user experience team.

Oh well ... there's still no guarantee that Google + will be any more popular than all their other attempts at building a social network so maybe I won't have to worry about Google + for much longer.

Bending WordPress to your will
So what are you using these days to design your websites? Just in the last few months we have moved almost entirely over to using WordPress for the sites we design for clients ... and for ourselves.

If you still think that WordPress is just about blogging then I've got to tell you that those days have gone and you need to take another look at the latest WordPress release. WordPress has gone from being one dimensional to being something that you can use for just about any sort of website from free sites, paysites right through to TGP galleries.

Not only does WordPress now allow you to work quickly but, depending on the theme you use, changing the CSS can be a breeze too. But WordPress is still not perfect ... there are a couple of things that you need to add to the basic WordPress set up to make it even better.

Perhaps the worst issue with WordPress is the visual editor that comes as standard. In plain language that visual editor just plain sucks and getting things to appear as you might want them to appear is a total pain.

There are problems with fonts, line breaks that don't and if you wanted to add a table you have to go over to the code editor. Even doing something in the code editor can be a hassle because if you switched to the visual editor without saving you lose what you have just done.

It's so bad that you have to wonder why the people behind WordPress have included such a piece of crap. Sure there have been a few plugins like Simple Breaks that solve one or two of the problems but sometimes those plugins create even more problems than they solve. Try deactivating them and see what happens to the text on your posts and pages.

But now there's a free plugin that cures just about everything that was wrong with that visual editor. It's called Ultimate TinyMCE and you can grab it from the WordPress site. It installs in no time at all and once it's there you can set it up in just a few seconds and suddenly that sucky visual interface will do so much more.

You can now move between the visual editor and the code editor without losing what you had been working on. Line breaks are exactly that and don't need any extra coding to get the breaks to actually appear as such on the site.

There's also the ability to even more easily edit the CSS styles, add extra styling to small amounts of text, add subscript and superscript and now inserting a table is just a matter of clicking a button and entering the number columns and rows you want and you don't have to leave the visual editor to do it.

Inserting anchor text can be done from the visual editor too and if you still live for emoticons that's now available with Ultimate TinyMCE.

Why this isn't the standard editor in WordPress sure beats me.

And one other relatively new plugin that's worth mentioning is Exclude Pages from Navigation. By default every time you add a page WordPress adds it to the navigation and that means you have to take a few moments to dig into the code and hide the link if you don't want that page appearing with all the other navigation links

This plugin allows you to override the default setting so that your navigation bar doesn't become cluttered with links to pages that aren't necessarily as important as those that appear in the main navigation bar. Removing a tick removes the page from the navigation and reinstating it is just a matter of placing a tick in the box.

There's no doubt that life for webmasters is becoming so much easier now that WordPress is starting to become a serious tool for us. In the past you could still build a normal website using WordPress but you certainly had to hack the code to get it to bend to your will ... these days it's all just a matter of ticking boxes and clicking buttons.

I think I've fallen in love with it.