Month: September 2017

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Event software

If you need to book an on-Slack support session - you can request a booking to be confirmed here. You must have a current Introductory plan or a Development project ongoing or live.
Appointment Calendar Powered By: AppointZilla

CMS Users

WordPress has a number of plugins for managing events, some of this are not the same as the others!

 

fooevents – extensive ticket printing and calendar based woo-commerce plugin

cost and budget for implementation £250 – £750

 

WordPress Event Booking Manager

Free, with Pro upgrade – for ticket selling to events

 

Appointment management

Testing a plugin – book a session

 

 

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Lexicon

There are whole languages dedicated to how your image may be represented on your screens, languages that direct how email is delivered and yet more, including this one, the one people understand.

We have a lot of terms around technical subjects and nomenclature is oft a reason to avoid breaking the ice and understanding even basic things.  Language is a tool – and should never be a barrier – so this page is dedicated to clarity.

 

D

domain

Your address on the web

L

Lithium Cloud Hosting

Our mail server may send you messages.  As this is its name, it may be from lithium.cloudhosting.co.uk.  Do not worry.  It is just a server name.

S

Subdomain

A secondary domain from your domain which can host a separate or website or service allowing extensions to make your site richer without also making it too complex to work on.

W

www

www is a subdomain of your main domain.  Your main domain is used as the suffix for email addresses: e.g. yourname@abc.xyz

The domain, abc.xyz has a subdomain called www.abc.xyz – this is usually configured to load your domain website (so abc.xyz or www.abc.xyz would both load www.abc.xyz).

You should always use www. when referring to your website unless it is in an email address or if you actually want to refer to a subdomain which replaces www.

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Your content and social media

Linking to social media

It is important to link your content to social media and for some social media this is easy and others it is a little tricky.  How you design your network should be carefully considered.  There are lots of methods to do this in both CMS and Development sites.  Here is my opinion as to what should work for you without compromising your copyright on your unique images, etc.

It totally depends on where you do business – if it is on your own website – you most likely would want to direct people from the Social sites to an interesting article, image or story with a call to action link to a product or event page on your site – then as they filter through – you invite them (forcefully) to get them to subscribe to your own site. The contacts you make on Social Media are based on shared content that you are giving license to FB to use again without asking. I think therefore it is better if your content is posted here (where you do have clear copyright rights and branding) and social media links

The contacts you make on Social Media are thus collected into a subscriber mailing list you can build and own.

Shared content posted directly to social media may give perpetual license to the social site for your work (this includes Facebook, Twitter and many others).

I think therefore it is better if your content is posted under your own domain first before sharing.  Not only do you have clear copyright and branding but you can measure results and send people into your sales funnel. ) and social media links

Yes, you should have social media links into all sorts of pages or posts on your website. On my special interest blogs – I automatically link new posts to make a FB Group Post.  As I build a following on my FB Group with low friction I can also setup FB shop pages using Shopify – but if content is linked back to my website and my website works – then I can sell without paying 30% commission and declare my copyright (so that any use by Facebook is limited to one of say ten images, the prospect of copyright infringement based on is balanced against your need to promote.

It makes sense to put up your promotional image as the Featured image of your post, and then FB share the post after you have checked it at least twice in different browsers Incognito or Private mode.

When you have categories in your website that take posts and automatically your new posts are shared across all your social media you have saved yourself tons of time.  But always check the post on your site before you consider sharing it and then share it on Twitter first so you can check what happens when the link is clicked.  Your penultimate hare should be on FB and then the last with Google Plus – but leave the last for a day – as it is most likely to work based on other links.  You could do one share per day to each social media and

You could do one share per day to each social media and guage the effect on your site.  If you are at that level, then ask for full admin rights (newbies be warned: you will not learn much in admin mode), and you will be able to view stats.  You will also be able to disable your site by accident so please be a WordPress wizard when you ask.  It will save a lot of time and cost.

 

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Development Story

Adding new kinds of products to Remote Development

Products had been kind of rushed and too specifically sewn together while getting the latest version of VueJS working for me instead of against me!

It is tricky to debug but very informative, it basically is telling you if you have configured it incorrectly, so it produces only working Javascript that effectively abstracts to make a logical component architecture.  Sometimes you have to fiddle to get things right, like any architecture you have to get used to the tool set.

We went from three or four basic products to being able to add products to generate enquiries without much configuration and importantly by only creating the product and its membership in certain groups.  Configuration changed things.

Next, we have to think about a sales presentation – the component architecture is now taken to its elemental pieces – they can be organised into prettier boxes without breaking everything!

 

 

 

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Picking and specifying web colour

Or color – the American spelling is used on the web.  The English version is used in novels.

We have a system for specifying a colour with 256 stages for each primary.

RGBA = Red Green Blue Alpha.  Alpha is the opacity level, and defaults to 1 (100% – i.e. no transparency).

Technical

Hex colours are expressed as a triplet of hex numbers (i.e. hex numerals from 0 to 15 are reprented as 0, 1, 2,3, 4, 5, 6,7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E.   255 is represented as 0xFF or just FF

Each colour can be represented with a leading #RRGGBB series, or as an rgb or rgba function.

Examples

#000000 = no colour = black

#00ff00 = 100% green

#ffff00 = 100% yellow

rgb(23,34,45) = #233445

rgb(255,0,0) = red = #ff0000

Useful Link

For a useful colour tool to mix your own pallet try this:

https://www.hexcolortool.com/#8dbfb6

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Evolution

We are evolving better ways to introduce our abilities to clients, replicating successful software development practices used by major London agencies.  We want to continue to offer remote software services to corporate clients and at the same time build teams of developers who are available to clients and build new web businesses for clients.  Here are recent post updates summarised for a quicker read.

How to: WordPress: Make a post

How to: WordPress: making a new post

New Client Homepage

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How to: WordPress: Make a post 2

You are creating a post.  What do you do now?

The important things to really get right are:

  • Good Title
  • Vivid Body
  • Logical Category
  • Lexical Tags

Title

The title has to attract keyword engines as well as humans.  Make them keyword rich, as this is the most commonly seen version of your website.

Body

The Body content needs to communicate its meaning with the reader being the most important person in the world.  Not in a direct second person or

The reader is the most important person in the world.  The tone should be bright and direct, not confrontational.  It should be simple to move forward.

 

Sites have gone from being content rich snappy menu systems to everything living together on one page, the Single Page Application or SPA.

The best WordPress sites seem to combine these ideas in a visual metaphor that supports navigation rather than function, whereas framework sites can become more adventurous.

Category

Organise your pages by Category, religiously add 3 or 5 tag keywords.  Do not publish anything Uncategorised unless you use it to hide articles, which I think is a good way to remove an article from a menu infrastructure.

Tags

The trick is to find a balance between and to reuse keywords as much as possible, not create a vast army of different top-level keywords.  

I think a simple tree structure that is 4 – 7 options at each level and about 4 levels deep is about right – but it depends on the content and if you can be bothered with tags.  I think they are a good idea if they help increase the semantic difference and relevance of the page in a multitude of combinations.  It is the scattered crumbs that may attract people and search engines apparently eat them for breakfast.

Discussion: Allow comments

Personal decision but I prefer it if only a very few article pages on my sites allow users to comment.  It just looks wrong on a Contact Us here page, but if you are a business, it is quite valid.  But for many sites, be selective about adding Comments on Page content but allow it on Posts.  Generally, not always.

 

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New Client Homepage

We are considering releasing an update that expands client options to include a range of Introductory options for first timers and ongoing services for existing clients.

We develop software designed by clients and get their hands dirty controlling their web assets.  We integrate e-commerce pages into the site for clients (in sites like this site, a CMS), or advanced framework full stack development to make your web business ideas into online sales pages.

Our home page allows clients who have an (optional) Intro page to expand it with services, or to build their online infrastructure with our help.

live.RemoteDevelopment.co.uk is a living example of one of our Full Stack projects, it is a full stack Laravel project.  You have to register to use it.  It is free to Register and to use to generate enquiries.  We may have a cost-effective solution to your business problem or be able to take your business to the next step with its use of WordPress.

Clients who register will be given more options to order services or make enquries.

  • Services
  • Hosting
  • Bandwidth
  • Upgrades
  • Development

Services

Order Intro sites

Order CMS sites

SSL services

Domain services

Hosting

CMS hosting fully supported on proven and established third-party infrastructure

Cloud Hosting fully supported – fast websites, secure environments, easily rebuilt instances if latest Linux software

Data Hosting – large scale data cloud for reasonable rates

Bandwidth

CMS: Unlmited (spikes may be looked at or trigger agents to prevent abuse)

Cloud: You are the only person affected by what you do.  The first 500Meg of transfer per month if free, we charge by the Gigabyte.  We try and keep it inexpensive by offering cheap storage for a massive datastore.  Bandwidth is what you serve.  It is more a function of how many users access your content.

Upgrades

Development

 

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Introductory package idea

In a single week “Sprint” we can often train a dedicated client to maintain their own blog with social networking, membership and informational pages.  Our Introductory offer is to use our site configuration skills to provide a framework to work with from Day One.  We include up to 5 day of developer time in the Introductory offer.  This 5 days may be taken over a period of 3 months or 6 months.  The website may be visible the whole time (we advise this), or it can be kept private (sometimes a good idea for two weeks at the start or for a release event).

For the Introductory duration you continue to have daily support contact without any fuss to build new website capabilities, provide configurations, apply your design and colour plans, adjust any of the above.

We work with Clients who want to know how to achieve good site content that is both relevant to their own customers.  You can also use this time to provide online ecommerce purchase pages and totally secure isolated payment systems.  We can install your software and configure it and teach you to use it online in a support session.  If we need to send you a screen shot or a link we can.  We are (for the foreseeable future), human.

We realise this may take you month, but 15 minutes a day support may keep you making better content.  You do the posting, writing, uploading.  We help you organise and maintain it.

 

 

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How to: WordPress: Make a post 1

Login to your wordpress account:

websiteaddress.com/wp-admin

the top black menu is a quick way to do useful things in WordPress.

on the Left is a W in a circle (wordpress link), then a HOME button and the site name.  Then indications of how many updates are available, how many comments and then the  [ + New link ] to add new Posts.

The left hand menu also allows you to list and add new posts.

If you are currently an AUTHOR – you can only add posts.    Your admin will setup Categories for these.  Each post belongs to one or more categories and the selection of the category agrees with the Menu items in the Updates item of your main menu.

Your site Admin will help you to add new categories and may advise you to keep categories list to an absolute minimum.

Posts, Post Categories and Pages can all be menu items but as an Author, you can not add to menus.   You admin will do this for you.  Simply assign it to an existing Post Category and your post will be accessible from the menu.

Or, assign it to the Admin category, and Slack the post URL (the link near the top of the page that appears under the title when you have added the title) to the admin.   Admin posts do not appear on your public site, usually.