shortcodes

Shortcodes can be pasted into a page or post using either the Visual or the Text editor, and the shortcode’s output appears within the editor at the point you select. For example an eCommerce site delivery terms could be on hundreds of product pages you have a shortcode:

  • [delivery-terms]

That’s it [delivery-terms] is all you have to type.

What’s the major benefit:

  • consistent information for your web visitor builds trust
  • you don’t have to copy paste between pages
  • the shortcode content is edited in one place
  • changes are instantly updated across your website
  • it save’s you loads & loads of editing time 🙂

Let’s look at a simple use case your company started trading in 2006 and you write an article in 2016 you might quote “we have been trading for 10 years” then 2 years later you write another article “we have been trading for 12 years” so your first article now needs to be updated to reflect the correct years.

Or a shortcode that will use the trading start date, it checks with the web server for the current year, the code does the math to return the value of 18 …..

Use the following but remove the stars

[*trading-years*] - [*wfu-years-todate*] - [*trailers-sold*] - [*alumni*] - [*entrepreneurs*] - [*oven-40*] - [*oven-48*]- [*oven-56*]
  • Fire Within has 18yrs experience we know loads about stuff”
  • the WFU started over 12yrs ago
  • we have sold 1,800 trailers in 18yrs
  • our community totals 3,200 alumni members
  • we have help 1,400 entrepreneurs

Our 48 inch oven has the following features

48″ 120cm Hearth

  • 3.25″ thick oven dome
  • 6-8 10″ pizzas
  • 7 Large pizzas 14-16″
  • 60 min heat up time

design process

During the build process of your website we used the above shortcodes, in the page templates, but you can change this information in the:

  • left side of the admin > dashboard > website settings > repetitive content

As your site grows we are sure you will identify other areas where a shortcode will save time, just let us know, our objective is to make your website something you enjoy updating not a task you dread doing.

good content

everyone uses Microsoft Word! apparently

Because Word is such a common tool for managing documents, many people paste content from Word into their website pages and expect it to look the same. It’ won’t be…..

Your website is built on a Content Management System (CMS) (WordPress) so you have the freedom to manage content, change images, and generally make day-to-day updates to the website.

Text on the web works differently than text in a word processor. As a result, if you copy and paste content from Word into a web page, it will cause all sorts of formatting issues and even cause the text to be “broken” beyond repair. Microsoft Word is notorious for adding all sorts of terrible code into web pages that ruin formatting.

We’d like to help you learn to love website content again with two quick tips for pasting from Word (or any other word processor) into your web editor

use a bridging app Notepad

If you’re on Windows, there is a built-in application called Notepad. Notepad is a very lightweight scaled down text editor that doesn’t have a whole lot of functionality. This makes it great for “cleaning” text.

Using Notepad as a bridge, you first copy the text from your Word document into Notepad. Then, copy from Notepad and paste it into your web page editor. This usually results in cleaner text and better formatting. You may need to add some formatting that was stripped by Notepad although this sounds like loads of extra work, it’s much quicker than trying to fix broken content in the web page editor.

copying from another webpage

The same rules apply as above the page your copying from has different formatting styles applied to it’s text page layout, so you need to sanitize that text to remove the formatting. There is a warning here any content you copy could be subject to copyright.

heading and content styling

Your page will use the title of your page that’s set in the template as a H1
Your other headings should be set as h2 > h6
WHY? because it’s important for your SEO.

Using UPPERCASE is considered as shouting in txt sms language, why do people feel the need to shout at their web visitors, ask your self the question would you do it to your customer face to face.

As a general rule of thumb heading tags are used to break up your content

I am a h2 heading main section heading

I am a h3 heading sub section heading

I am a h4 heading a lower sub section heading

font size i want it bigger

Your site has a font system that’s fully responsive to the user screen size, based on current web usage trends.

Maybe your using a 42″ monitor but that is not the norm, 80% of traffic is from handheld devices/laptops. So if you feel the need to use very big font size’s to accommodate your 42″ monitor bear in mind it’s going to look huge on a mobile and frankly really unprofessional.

A better suggestion would be to adjust your 42″ monitor to cater for your viewing preferences.

need a playground

Yes we can give you one of those, after any build or rebuild process things change and people get nervous about breaking the website. So we can setup a copy of the new website in a safe zone for people to play and learn without the fear of breaking the live company site.

Images

We all love a good picture but getting it the right size for purpose is important, as we now have amazing phones/cameras those raw images are not suitable to directly upload to your website.

  • Firstly they need to be named correctly
  • company name – what is it – what is it for – what size is it
  • Fire Within – our xyz product model blue – blog article – 800x800px
  • now it’s good for SEO and you will be able to find it in the media directory
  • image compression happens before your image is uploaded
    • big images require more server space
    • more server space requires more money
    • big images take longer to load
    • big images slow down the user experience
    • search engines will mark your website down
  • Ask us for the list of recommend image size’s used on your website and the best tools you can use
  • or we can just do it for you, whatever makes your life easier