Author: Nicholas Alexander

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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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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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Improving client route

We seem to spend more time under the bonnet than we should but the admin system of https://live.remotedevelopment.co.uk/ must be able to manage the data structures created by new or existing clients.

Now we have to improve the client interface.    It is not bad. But it needs to work and at the moment it is a bit like a structure or foundation rather than being the journey it needs to be.

It is already a series of Vue Components and now here is the beauty of Vue.  To replace them all I need to know is what parameter is being passed in.  Most of these screens do not need to know much – they are more to do with the story they tell.  How to advance from one idea to the next – are they correlated in a way people understand or that only someone who works with Data Logic will follow.

One of the strange reasons I stayed with Windows so long is that I could not work out immediately and instinctively how to drive a Mac.  What an admission, I know.  But I find this quite often – with correctly thought out designs that people get, sometimes I find that just as confusing as I realise they may find my marketing based screens.  I think I have overbaked it and without looking it – well I asked my favourite artist for her opinion and she said something that echoes through time “Make it simple.”

The only superior datum there is is indeed a contraction of it itself (see what I mean, more simply put: The only thing more important are the first two words) make it.

It figures that the programming mind and the visual mind may use similar muscles. It is what makes “Full-Stack” development more difficult but effective sometimes at growing according to a vision.

Sales should encourage and open dialogue between client and worker.  The data worker is best served with concise information.  This comes from written text.  It only comes to light after verbal discussion.  We use presentions, diagrams and use-cases to ensure we understand a requirement but the only thing that is subjective is the user interface.  We want to agree on the back-end and that also has to be flexible as new ideas arise.

This is getting too long.  Typical.  Maybe should be programming.  To be continued…

 

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WordPress: plugins

A list of what we install with WordPress images:

  • Jetpack (free)
  • Akismet (free with wordpress.com registration)
  • WooCommerce (free)
  • Stripe for WooCommerce (client must start a stripe account)
  • WooCommerce Subscriptions (£150)
  • Ultimate Member (free)
  • UM Subscription (£250 ?)
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VueJS: Revisiting components

One of the things about software development you do not reallse until later is now important well thought out encapsulation and clarity is when you revisit old code.

One factor is predictability, what else can the programmer have possibly meant?  One of the good artifacts of programming is the contained universe and in a Vue JS or Angular component, you have just that.  An entity that defines itself in strict terms: an entity that is clear in its meaning and intent.

Because it follows the rules, you find it remarkably easy to understand what the component is and what its interface with the outside is.

That is all you want to know.   Vue JS makes designing interactions between front end input components that make sense in their own light.  Contained predictability is an asset in exposed interfaces.  Vue JS intervenes just enough that Javascript starts to make sense.

 

 

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Software Construction

Why not build the front end using WordPress with Angular. And build the backend with Laravel and VueJS. Or, the other way around? What do this even mean?

What do people mean by Back-end and Front-end in software development? It can be M vs VC or it can mean a database vs a display terminal, or it can mean the communications relationship responsibility and rules you apply to open channels between modules. Lost you yet?

Software can be hard to maintain if it is constructed in a monolithic fashion.

Or, software can comprise individually constructed components that interact, supported by backend state recording and other processes. Messages are the bits of memory flying between the clusters of logic. The reason the “dashboard” metaphor gets so much use if that it reflects this model. We want to see and control the software from one place.

The software we use to create environments that are constructed in this way are more resilient to change as they are always being made to work properly with a current set of scheduled changes.

“Reusable software” is a bit of a scam. It is not that you can literally reuse the universe of software assuming everything perfected needs to be forgotten about and simply linked to in various documented service connections. It is in the design of a software module: a concept of code reusability is important, but you do not have to do it just for the sake of it. Sometimes it is better to write with other priorities: speed, results, accuracy, and testability may be important, but generally will become less of a problem if you develop with usability as the primary objective.

We segment software into MVC patterns and the like because we know they fit the functionality we are looking for, abstractions are useful as we can fit them together.

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Contracting example: tescomobile

Nicholas Alexander worked for three consecutive contract terms with Essence Digital in a team of Zend Angular WordPress and SCSS developers.

The site we worked on involved creating Angular rendered components managed by WordPress and connected via an API layer.

These examples include the skills of a team. There is no reason your site could not be this professional.

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Ecommerce success

Woocommerce running on SSL site in a few hours

Yesterday, my artist and partner had a really good idea. It involved an online gallery and new works on the celebration of new life in her family. The website is an e-commerce site, and as ever, I was ready to roll my sleeves up.

I installed WordPress on a Cloud server for the best CMS experience and fluidity (with the right plugins WordPress is a fast way to get a website running). The Cloud version is slightly more difficult to setup than via a shared hosting environment: but once you have it right, then it is “process”. Programmers love “process”.

A working e-commerce shop advertising and selling a sample set of goods that can be paid for online, quickly and safely was the goal. The basic problem of business is the selling of goods and services.

We wanted a gallery and for it to work with all ecommerce features – so set it up with Woocommerce using their template as a base and it will be published real soon now. Watch this space, it is called the the Art4Kids Gallery.

This story is very similar to how our Initial Website Offer was thought about.

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Site profile: Software Antelope

Before Remote Development I created this interface using html, css, d3js, and boostrap for the company that owns Remote Development, Software Antelope Ltd. (I made the software and then was hired as an onsite contractor spending 25% over-time travelling to and from work). Remote Development is a new iteration of the same project – completely new software and brand.

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Agile

Agile Software Development was developed by some of the best minds in our industry. Years ago. Since 1998 it has become the way to do things.

Short Iterations
We use 10 day sprints (over two weeks). During each Sprint, we follow a sprint plan. We need two basic sprint plans for the initial sprint for a CMS site or a Development project. These can be patterns, something like:

CMS

  • collect design components from the client using survey page*
  • Create WordPress Instance, connect to domain and email addresses
  • Using a base template* and the core set of plugins* create pages and menus for the Core Items*
  • Liaise with client to collect core information for Contact us and About us page

Development Project

  • Get basic info from the Client
  • Instantiate base site on Cloud
  • Implement User Registration and Auth
  • Client specific steps…

These are not complete! Discussion with the client over Slack is required for 2 – 4 days to flesh out the project.

*there are common elements we can write to make our lives far easier and expand on what we can implement during the first sprint. Each item we develop, we share across the network so that we have constantly rising standards of delivery for that all important first sprint.

TDD (Test Driven Development) – Laravel has an excellent TDD method. Development Projects benefit in quality and speed by using TDD. 100% test coverage is the goal with TDD. It is best practice. If you develop without TDD, then you will spend more time debugging when adding a new feature later.

Sprints – Each ticket on Trello is in a subject column. Each ticket has a label which has a status. These are

Research
Concepts
In DESIGN
ACTIVE
DONE
BUG

When a ticket is done, it stays around until the end of the sprint, and then it is Archived. We do not resurrect a ticket, we create a BUG ticket if the problem arises in a new Sprint or reset the DONE flag if it is not really complete.

Tickets
Each ticket you pick up at the Scrum meeting – you complete that day. Each ticket is given another tag during Sprint Planning which is simply a projection of how many hours the ticket can be done in. This is a planning expectation and helps us organise work. Each ticket is completed with QUALITY first, meaning the deadline is not as important than it is completed professionally and forever. Each Developer has a Label which is used to assign the task.

Example

Scrum
Every day at a strictly appointed time, the team review the Trello board over a Google Hangout. Get your coffee before the meeting, and anyone who does not join the meeting on time will get assigned work. Anyone at the meeting assigns their own work. If work is not completed from the previous Scrum, then it is continued and NO NEW TICKET can be assigned. If it is near the end of the Sprint, other developers may collaborate but most tickets are the singular responsibility of the assigned developer. If you want to claim a share of the reward, then you have to do the work!