Web Design

Podcast Episode 5 – How to Choose a WordPress Theme

August 23, 2016 by Kelli

In this episode, I answer the oft asked question: How do I choose a WordPress Theme?

LINKS IN THIS EPISODE:

WordPress Theme guidelines – What is a theme

TRANSCRIPT OF THIS EPISODE

Welcome back to another episode of the Pint Sized Podcast. I’m Kelli Wise, head honcho at Pint Sized Sites and I’m here to answer your questions about WordPress and Websites.

In my business, I’ve narrowed down the themes I allow clients to choose from to Genesis child themes and fully custom themes. I’m pretty adept at modifying Genesis child themes and the parent theme works well, so that’s allowed me to continue to offer sites at reasonable prices. There’s also a huge selection of child themes to start from, so that allows my clients to have a variety of themes to choose from.

The fully custom stuff is, of course, completely custom and I’m in full control of the code, so I should know my way around it.

For most of you, however, creating your own theme from scratch, or from a starter like underscores, is not a real alternative. You’re looking to buy or download a theme. You probably don’t want to mess with code. At all.

In that case, Genesis might be a stretch, too, if it’s out of your price point.

Fortunately, there are thousands of themes to choose from, both free and for a pretty reasonable amount of money.

And that’s turned into a real problem. There really are THOUSANDS, if not tens of thousands of themes to choose from. And that brings me to the question for this episode:

How do I choose a WordPress theme?

In the last 4 weeks, I’ve been asked this same question multiple times, so I’m not even going to give you one listener’s name. If you haven’t asked it, you probably want to. So let’s talk about how to wade through the dizzying array of themes and narrow down your choices.

But first:

Before we get too deep in themes, I want to explain a key difference between themes and plugins in WordPress. According to WordPress.org, themes ‘take the content and data stored by WordPress and display it in the browser.” ¹

That’s it. That’s what a theme should do. Take your content, the words and pictures, and make them look good.

A plugin controls the behavior and features of your WordPress site.

It adds functionality like contact forms or events or slide shows.

“Any theme you create should not add critical functionality. Doing so means that when a user changes their theme, they lose access to that functionality.”

You are likely to switch themes at some point in your web life, so it’s best practice to put the functionality your site needs in a plugin and let the theme take care of the appearance.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s talk about what you should consider when you are looking for a theme.

The first thing I want you to consider is:

What features/functionality do you need from your website? Need. Not want.

As a starter, your website NEEDS to be responsive. That means, it adjusts its appearance depending on the screen size. Gone are the days of pinch and zoom when you’re looking at a website on your smart phone. Today’s websites will resize elements, move elements, change menus to those little hamburger thingies and generally just be a lot easier to use for normal size fingers on different size screens.

Responsive is an appearance issue, so it’s best left to the theme to do. So write down RESPONSIVE on your needs list.

Let’s make it Not Ugly!

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but let’s try to shy away from butt ugly. There are websites devoted to showcasing ugly websites. Don’t be on their list, ok?

If it’s not ugly, then it must be attractive, right? Yes, but. That caveat is that it must be visually appealing to your target visitor. It should reflect your personality, or your company’s personality and reflect your visitors’ aspirations. Punk bands and day spas will have different aesthetics. Unless you have a punk day spa, which is a thing and good on ya.

What I’m trying, and failing, to communicate is: if your favorite color is baby doll pink and you are marketing motorcycle leathers to Harley riders, you might not want to use a lot of baby doll pink in your web design. Unless your niche Harley rider is into baby doll pink, in which case you should definitely use it.

One good question that was posed in a recent WordPress meetup group was: If the trend now is towards minimalism and I use a theme that isn’t, will I look out of date? My opinion on that is, No. Every design trend is just that, a trend. A couple years ago, we were all doing flat design. Before that was drop shadows. Now, drop shadows are making a more subtle comeback. So, not following the latest trend today may put you leading the trends of tomorrow. However, the old Kubrick theme isn’t really retro, it’s just old and dated. Find something else.

Don’t let the pretty get in the way, though. I’ve seen websites that were gorgeous but unusable. You can’t find the menu, you can’t find the information you want, you can’t do business with them.

As an example of a website that is attractive but not beautiful, look at Amazon. It’s not a drop dead gorgeous website, but it presents the information the shopper needs in a way that makes the site easy to find the product they are looking for and purchase that product.

And that brings me to making the site usable. The theme should present the information that your customer needs and make it easy to find what they need. There should be adequate menus. There should be places for your contact information. The text should be readable – that means big enough and contrasty enough to be viewable by folks over the age of 25.

Don’t let the ‘target industry’ drive your choice. Don’t reject a theme just because it’s marketed at an industry that isn’t yours. One of the most used themes at Genesis is Foodie Pro and it’s used for a lot of non-food businesses.

The next thing to look for is Customizability.

WordPress continues to make the theme customization easier to use for non-coders. They even have a window now for “Customize” that theme developers can take advantage of. This kind of customization affects the theme’s appearance, so this functionality belongs in the theme.

Can you change colors? Are there the right page layouts for your business? Can you add your logo? Can you tweak it enough to make it yours?

Are the color choices limited to a specific few or can you change the colors to match your branding? Some themes come with a ‘blue’ version but it may not match your blue.

Drag and drop design features are another feature but I’ll cover those in another podcast. It’s just too large a topic to include here. Let’s just say that if you choose a drag and drop theme, you need to know what happens to your website when you change themes in the future. Some of them leave a mess and some of them leave you without any content.

And that brings me to Theme Lock

This is where you are locked into the theme. There is some functionality in the theme that will prevent you from changing themes.

One example I’ve seen is restaurant themes. I’ve seen a couple of restaurant themes where the menu functionality is built into the theme. The theme is creating a custom post type for the menus and menu items. You spend hours adding all of that content and you keep it updated every week or month. Then one day, you want to change your theme. Lo and behold, all of your menu data is gone. Now you have to re-enter everything.

The better way to do this is to have a restaurant plugin that allows you to create your breakfast, lunch, and dinner menus and display them on whichever theme you choose. Now when you change themes, your data is still there and you don’t have to re-type everything.

What drives theme developers to add all this functionality? Users do. They don’t understand theme lock or the downsides to bundling all of this functionality into the theme. It’s one thing they install and then they can forget the whole web design task and get on with their business. Bad idea.

So, theme designers add functionality and the theme sells. So the next developer adds more functionality to compete with the first guy. And on and on. We now have a theme arms race

Take a look at the themes in the theme marketplaces like Theme Forest.

Theme A has one slider, so Theme B has 2. Theme C has 2 sliders plus a contact form. Theme D has 3 sliders, a contact form, Woo Commerce and Visual Composer. And on and on it goes.

Ideally, you would have a pretty theme and plugins for your slider, contact form, woocommerce and drag and drop page layout.

Theme lock not only locks you in to a theme, but what happens when a feature becomes a security risk? Like Revolution slider? A lot of themes came with that bundled in and no way for the user to remove it. Now, you’re locked into the theme with a security vulnerability or you pretty much need to start from scratch. If you used a slider plugin, you could switch sliders, change out the short codes, reapply your slides and be good to go.

The last thing to consider, and frankly one of the most important is Support

Does the developer keep the theme updated? Does he or she answer questions? In a timely manner? Do bugs get addressed and fixed?

If I have a choice between 2 themes that are equally attractive and suitable, I will always pick the one that is being actively supported. In fact, I will go for a bit uglier if the prettier theme isn’t being supported. Why? Because questions happen and I don’t always have time to figure it out myself.

To recap, when you are choosing a theme for your site go for

Responsive
Attractive
Customizable
Not locked in
Supported

That’s all for this episode. To everyone who has asked me about how to choose a theme, thanks for the question. I hope this helps.

Thanks to you for listening. If you have questions or comments, be sure to visit the website at

Pint sized sites dot com / Podcast for links to this episode. You’ll also find show notes and a transcript with any links mentioned here and you’ll find all of the earlier episodes, too.

If you enjoyed this episode, I would love to have you pop on over to iTunes or stitcher or your podcast service of choice and leave a review. 5 stars would be awesome, but hey, no pressure, ok? Leaving a review makes it easier for other folks out there to find this program.

If you have a question you would like answered, go to pint sized sites dot com and look in the top menu for “ask a question”. Fill out the form and leave your name, if you are so inclined, and I’ll find an answer to your question in a future episode.

Thanks again for listening! Until next time, I’m Kelli Wise and you’ve been listening to the Pint Sized Podcast – website and WordPress help for small business!

1 – https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/getting-started/what-is-a-theme/

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Podcast Episode 4 – 5 Tasks to keep your website running smoothly

August 2, 2016 by Kelli

In this episode, I cover 5 tasks that should be done on a regular basis to keep your site running smoothly.

LINKS IN THIS EPISODE:

Nothing, really, to link to in this episode.

TRANSCRIPT OF THIS EPISODE

Welcome back to another episode of the Pint Sized Podcast. I’m Kelli Wise, web developer and below average cook – it’s on my Twitter profile so it must be true – and I’m here to answer your questions about WordPress and Websites.

This episode is going to be in the format of a list post. Ooooh, listicles, our favorite. This is actually from a blogging challenge prompt of a challenge I’m participating in, and the question I’m answering today fits in nicely.

So, Sunny, what is our question of the day? Sunny? Sorry, she’s off chasing a wee bit of reflected sunlight on the wall, so I’ll have to read this myself. I apologize in advance for any crashing sounds you hear in the background. Sunny never lets little things like doors, shelves, of height keep her from her fun.

Today’s question from a listener is:

I recently was having problems with my website. Nothing would update and I couldn’t save any posts. I just paid to have someone fix the issue. What sorts of things should I be doing to keep my WordPress website running smoothly and save me from hiring someone like you in the future?

This is a really good, and timely, question. This has been ‘repair week’ for me. I’ve cleaned up a hacked website and repaired a site that was acting up. And it’s only Tuesday. So, in this episode, I’m going to give you my 5 tasks for keeping things running smoothly.

Some of the things I tell you today are things I’ve said in the past. I’m like your dentist, always nagging you to floss.

But there are other things you can do occasionally that will be more preventive. Sort of like going to the dentist twice a year for cleanings and the occasional xray. You’re not going to do it every day, but it needs doing on occasion.

#1 Backups

You should be doing backups on a regular basis! How regular? Well, that depends on how much you update your website. If you post blog posts daily, you could, and should, be doing daily backups. If your site is largely static, then you should be doing at least monthly backups.

The beautiful thing about backups is: there are plugins that will do this and allow you to schedule the backups. For the average “blog post once a week”, small business that is my typical customer, I schedule weekly database backups and either monthly or bi-weekly full backups.

What’s the difference?

Well, the text and links for your posts and pages are stored in your database, so that needs to be backed up when you make edits or post something new. A full backup includes your database, all of the WordPress files, all of your theme files, and all of your plugin files. If your site isn’t changing much, then this probably doesn’t need to be done every week.

One other thing I would suggest is that you do a full backup before you do any major changes to your site, including loads of updates, and again after you make those changes.

And save several of your backups. That site that was exploited? I had to go back 2 backups to know that I had a clean copy of the website to refer to.

#2 Keep it updated

This cannot be said enough. I know you’ve got things working just the way you like them and I know you’re worried that updates are going to break something, but do it anyway. To rewrite Frank Herbert: “I must not fear. Fear is the website killer. Fear is the little death that brings hackers and spambots. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will click the update button. Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing. Only a clean and happy website will remain.”

And I apologize to Frank Herbert’s entire bloodline for that. But you get the point.

Update that sucker.

How often? At least weekly. More often if a security update has rolled out as there might be plugins that are being hardened, too. Fortunately, WordPress updates itself most of the time.

#3 Clean house

Have a bunch of unused plugins? Delete them. If they are being maintained by the developer, then they will always be around for you to reinstall them if you need them.

The same goes for themes, with one exception. Keep at least one default WordPress theme installed. I like to keep the latest, which is currently TwentySixteen. This serves 2 purposes: if anything happens to your current theme, WordPress will automatically switch to the default. Your site might look a little weird, but it will at least be visible. The other reason: if you ever have to troubleshoot WordPress or plugins, then every non-theme dependent plugin, and WordPress itself, should work with the default.

Beyond those 2 themes, you really should get rid of any extras. It’s just more stuff you have to maintain and audit.

How often should you do this? Right after your site goes live is a good time. Most people audition a bunch of themes and plugins while they are designing a site. They forget to delete all the discarded choices. Beyond that, I would recommend you do this twice a year.

#4 Log into your website and make sure your backups are running and your security plugins are doing their job

You can’t just add a backup plugin, schedule stuff, and walk away. Things happen. Scheduled backups quit running or something goes awry and the backups aren’t completing. You won’t know unless you check. So do that. Most backup plugins will let you know when the last backup ran and whether it completed successfully.

The same is true of your security plugins. I use iThemes Security Pro on my sites. I check the security logs weekly and add to the list of banned sites. It lets me see if there is an unusual amount of attempts to break into my site and then make adjustments if needed.

It also lets me see if the hosting company has an issue on their end. Remember that exploited site I mentioned at the top of the episode? Well, that exploit wasn’t the client’s fault, it was the hosting company’s. The client hired me to maintain their site. So, I installed all of my backup and security plugins and did some general cleanup.

I noticed, though, that IPs that were on the banned users list were actually getting through and continuing to attack the site. Several hours on the phone and several dozen emails with offshore tech support to explain that their servers were ignoring the htaccess rules weren’t enough for them to fix the problem in a timely manner. And the site was hacked as a result. In just 2 weeks time. So, I spent the better part of a day cleaning up the mess. They finally figured out what their problem was and fixed it.

If I hadn’t been monitoring my security plugins, though, we never would have known there was a server issue and the site would be vulnerable again.

How often should you monitor your backup and security plugins? Every week, when you do your updates. More often if there have been big updates in WordPress or an exploit is found in a particular plugin or theme.

#5 Audit and Replace old plugins and themes

This is one that I’m guilty of neglecting. What do I mean by this? Well, plugins and themes, especially the free versions on the WordPress repository often are abandoned by their old developer. Or there is a big security hole found in one. If you’re slider plugin is revolution slider, the old free one from the WordPress repo, or if your theme is old and has the old tim thumb code in it, it is a security breach waiting to happen.

Sometimes the plugin just gets so out of date that it doesn’t work all that well with the new WordPress updates.

Regardless, there are loads of plugins out there that are ready for the scrap heap. Take a look at the details of your plugins. When was the last time it was updated? 5 years ago? It’s likely time to find a newer replacement for it.

Yes, you might have to tweak your site some. Change out some shortcodes. But your site will be more secure and work more smoothly, too.

Another thing to look for in that big list of plugins you have installed: do you have more than one plugin that’s doing the same task? I’ve seen sites with multiple slider plugins installed and active. After an update or two, those two plugins that sort of worked together are now causing conflicts.

I’ve also seen a site with too many backup plugins, too many shortcode plugins, and the list goes on. This often happens when you have multiple people who maintain the website. A new staff member logs in and installs their favorite slider plugin, ignoring the other slider plugin currently installed.

Many times, these plugin conflicts don’t cause the great White screen of death. That’s an obvious sign that something is wrong. Rather, they start causing goofy problems like interfering with updates or not being able to access the admin area of the website or inserting weird code into the pages or moving things around on the web page. Things that aren’t as obvious as a plain white screen with a cryptic error message, but don’t be fooled, they are just as bad.

How often should you audit your site for old plugins and themes? I’d recommend at least once a year, maybe twice. Put it on your calendar for the week before your birthday. This way, you can give yourself the birthday gift of a happy, clean website.

Since it’s likely been a very long time since you did some of these tasks, I would like to challenge you to log onto your website today and complete all 5. Make sure you backup your site before, though!

Let me know how it goes for you.

I’d love to hear what you managed to get rid of, say your oldest, most out of date theme or plugin you got rid of. Did you actually have a copy of Kubrick in your theme files? I want to know, ‘cuz that is old school WordPress, right there.

That’s all for this episode. Thanks for your question, dear listener. I hope that helps.

Thanks so much for listening. If you have questions or comments, be sure to visit the website at

Pint sized sites dot com / Podcast for links to this episode. You’ll also find show notes with any links mentioned here and you’ll find all of the earlier episodes, too.

Thanks again for listening! Until next time, I’m Kelli Wise and you’ve been listening to the Pint Sized Podcast – website and WordPress help for small business!

PODCAST EPISODE 3 – Moving a WordPress website

July 26, 2016 by Kelli

In this episode, I’m covering why you might need to move a WordPress website and a plugin that makes migrating a WordPress website easy-peasy.

LINKS IN THIS EPISODE:

All in one WP Migration – This plugin is pretty darn good, and is a great, free alternative to

Backup Buddy – This plugin does migrations and backups. Not free, but it is probably one of the best in the market.

TRANSCRIPT OF THIS EPISODE

One of the most common questions I get, and that I see on Facebook, is how do I move my WordPress website?

There are a lot of different ways that you can migrate a website but one thing you can’t do is just simply go in and copy all the files from where it’s currently existing to where you want it to go and expect that it’s all good. WordPress doesn’t work that way.

You actually have an entire database, which is where all of your actual page content, your post content, and all of your settings are at. If you don’t move the database, then the site doesn’t migrate. All you’ve got is a whole bunch of files and nothing else.

There is a little more complexity in moving a WordPress website.

Now, one thing you might be asking yourself is why would I ever want to move a WordPress website? It’s all happy and snug here on my current web host. There several reasons that you would want to move a website. The first one, for people like me who develop websites for living, is that we don’t actually develop the sites at our customers site on their hosting. I tend to develop everything on my own hosting where I have my set up subdomains for my clients. We can make design changes, we can make content changes and it doesn’t affect their current live website. So, their current live website is happy and running somewhere else.

The other thing, for clients that have never had a website before, this also allows us to do all the development stuff, maybe put coming soon site where they’re at, or they can save themselves a little bit of money on that first month’s hosting while we develop the site. So all the work is being done on my hosting and then I have to move it to where the client’s web hosting is, whether they’re hosting at WP engine, or site ground, or blue host, or host gator, or Go Daddy or insert your favorite web host here.

The other reason you might want to move your website is if you become unhappy with your current web host and there are a lot of reasons for that. At some web hosts, their equipment or their customer service starts to degrade over time. I’ve actually moved several sites from one hosting company to another because I was unhappy with my old web host. Their servers were going down on a regular basis and their customer support used to be amazing. I became unhappy with them because that the equipment was dying on a regular basis and, when I would call for customer support, I got no one who could actually answer any questions and it would take them forever to get around to fixing anything.

Back in the old days of HTML, you could just copy all the files and put them in a zip file and just take over t a new host and copy them there and change your DNS settings. With WordPress, it works a little differently. There are files which, is WordPress, your plug-in files, and your theme files but the actual text that you’ve written is stored in the database.

The database actually stores all the text so you have to be able to move all of the database. The database also contains settings, including URLs, so we can’t just export the database at one host, import it to another and expect everything will go easy peasy. There are things that you have to go in and actually edit and if you do not know what you are doing – do not edit your MySQL database by hand. It’s really easy to mess up and everything will break. There is no undo function in MySQL. If you drop a table, it’s gone forever.

I don’t recommend that you edit databases directly unless you know what you’re doing and I’m assuming that if you’re on this podcast you probably aren’t a my SQL database expert.

How do you normally migrate a WordPress website? There are plug-ins that will help do this for those of us who don’t want to go in and edit in the database directly.

The plugin I’m most familiar with is Backup Buddy. I’ve been using it for years but backup Buddy requires that you be able to get into your cPanel settings for your hosting company, create a database, create a database user and password, and then you upload this import file. You run a script called import buddy and then you go in and edit the config.PHP for the WP – config file where you are actually adding in where the database is located. It requires a text editor it requires being able to FTP into the site to add that information to the WP config file and that may actually be beyond what you want to be able to do.

There are other plug-ins that will do this and I stumbled across one of couple weeks ago when I was developing a website for a client who is converting from old-school HTML site to WordPress. She purchased some WordPress managed hosting from Go Daddy. When you get managed WordPress hosting what they do is they actually install WordPress for you, and it’s a nice clean installation, there is no information about your website. You have to go in and and make all of your setting edits yourself – the title of the website and the personal links and all that other good stuff – and the only thing you have installed is only one post called hello world. There’s usually one page called sample page and there is no media.

The themes included are the default themes. Some managed hosting will install 45 other themes besides 2016 and then they will have a few other plug-ins that they have installed that they install on all their websites. Some of them are are required plug-ins for them and then some of them are just desirable. What I noticed on this particular site was they had a plug-in called all-in-one WP migration. I didn’t actually have her Go Daddy account information at the time so I thought I would give this a try with this all-in-one to BP migration plug-in and see if it works. If it doesn’t work, then you know I’m out a little bit of time. In the meantime, I get to play around and see if the plug-in works.

This is a free plug-in; it’s on the WordPress repository and I’ll have a link to it in the show notes. It is a plug-in that does migration and they say it’s the only tool that you will ever need to migrate a WordPress website. The nice thing with all-in-one WP migration is: it assumes that you have WordPress installed at the target hosting. Where you are moving the site from is what we will call the source and where you’re moving it to we will call the target.

You will have to have WordPress installed at the final location where you want your website. You don’t have to go into MySQL or cPanel. You don’t have to create a MySQL database. It’s already done it in a WordPress installation.

They’ve installed this plug-in on the target website and you install it on the source website. Then Iyou activate the plug-in in both places. From there, you actually just click on the source, go in and click on the export button – and there are some settings as to what you can export like you when one export the spam comments a you don’t have to do that I don’t want to export the page revisions you don’t need any of that – but you can also tell it not to export themes or anything. What you want to do when you’re migrating a site is to export the themes and plug-ins, the media and posts and pages and the settings. Once you click on this export you will get a file that you can download to your computer and that will be this weird file. It’s big long filename, but it is everything.

Don’t unzip it; don’t do anything to it. Just save it somewhere on your computer.

Now you go to your target site, and you’ve activated the plug-in, and you tell it you want to import. It’ll ask you to either drag and drop the file into a box or select the file. You’ll select the file that you exported from the source. It’s nice enough that it will throw up a big alert box that says the import process will overwrite your database, your media, plug-ins, and themes. If you’re doing this over a current site that has posts and pages, you can lose everything, but if you are migrating to a brand-new installation of WordPress you don’t have to worry because there isn’t anything there that you want anyway.

So once you have decided that, yes you’re okay, just click on continue and it will do its thing. it will take that file and unpack it. The next thing it will do is after it’s all done it’ll give you another box it says the data’s been imported successfully. Now it needs you to perform two more steps. So you have to go into the the settings area on your WP admin and go to the Permalinks and you have to click on ‘save the permalinks’ – but you have to do it twice.

There’s a video that this developer has -its only three and half minutes long. I recommend you watch it for three and half minutes and that will walk you through the whole process. That’s how easy this is – they can explain the entire thing in three and half minutes.

Once you click ‘save permalinks’ twice, not once but twice, now everything is good to go and you should have all of your posts and pages and all of the media and the themes and plug-ins. Everything is good to go on the new site and you’re happy.

So I did all of that and I was pleasantly shocked that it really was just that easy. The whole export import process probably took me less than 10 minutes and that includes watching the video and reading the directions like two or three times to make sure that I had it all right.

The plug-in developer also says that you can use this for backup purposes. You can use exports and save that so that you can have a complete copy of your website in case anything horrible should happen.

I decided, well what would happen if I imported all of this data on top of a current live site? I had a development site that I’m about to get rid of because it has served its purpose, but it had plug-ins it, had themes, that had ,pages and settings – all of that stuff was there. I took the same file from my client and I simply imported it into this development site to see what it would overwrite or what wouldn’t overwrite. Unsurprisingly, actually it did overwrite the posts and pages and all the settings so they change the name of the website and the taglines and every thing else. What was interesting, though, was it does not actually delete the old themes. I had some plug-ins and some themes on the site that I was importing to that were not on the source and when I was done those plug-ins and themes were still there. The plug-ins were not active and neither were the themes.

So clearly what this plug-in does is it overwrites the database but it does not delete everything in the plug-ins and themes folders; it just simply copies the new stuff in there. Now if you’ve got an old version of a plug-in on your target and a new version of the plug-in on the source, then what you end up with is the new version of the plug-in because it’ll overwrite all files. So I ended up with this website with copies of themes that I didn’t want to use like 2011, because seriously nobody would ever choose to use 2011 right now.

The plug-in works really well. I did try to see how it works if you were trying to recover from a backup and I did not get the backup process to work completely correctly. Something seemed to hang up on the target and I think that was my web hosting wasn’t happy with something. So I just kind of gave up after a while because who has that much time to play around with these experiments ?

What the end result here is: if you are looking for a free plug-in that will migrate your website from one host to another and does it without you having to go into cPanel and create a database and database user and a username password then all-in-one WP migration is a really good choice. The developer does keep it up-to-date and it is compatible with the current versions of WordPress as I have recorded this which is at 4.5.3. It’s just really simple. There’s a nice help video, should you need it, and again when the entire instructional video is about three and half minutes long, you know that the process is not to be difficult.

If you’re not ready to make the full investment in a plug-in like backup Buddy, then all-in-one WP migration is a really good alternative for you to move a website.

So that should about do it on the how to migrate a site and a little bit about the why. Should you have any questions about what I’ve talked about here, feel free to contact me.

If you enjoyed this episode, I would love to have you pop on over to iTunes or Stitcher or your podcast service of choice and leave a review. 5 stars would be awesome, but hey, no pressure, ok? Leaving a review makes it easier for other folks out there to find this program.

If you have a question you would like answered, go to Pint Sized Sites dot com and look in the top menu for “ask a question”. Fill out the form and leave your name, if you are so inclined, and I’ll find an answer to your question in a future episode.

Thanks again for listening! Until next time!

Affiliate disclosure – Yes, I have a couple of affiliate links in here. I only do that for products I personally use and recommend. Click on them or don’t – it’s entirely up to you. But the affiliate income helps pay for the podcast hosting, so it would be appreciated.

Podcast Episode 2 – Learning HTML

July 18, 2016 by Kelli

In this episode, I’m answering a listener’s question: do I need to learn html and where do I go to learn html?

Links in this episode:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/html

http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/textwrangler/id404010395?mt=12

Transcript of this episode

(pretty close to what I said but without the ums, ahs, and whatever noise the Executive Producers are making in the background)

Hi there and welcome to another episode of the pint sized podcast where we answer your questions on wordpress and websites. I’m your host Kelli Wise of Pint Sized Sites.

The executive producers, Sunny and Scout, tell me that we have a question from a listener about learning html. This listener wants to know:

“Do I need to learn HTML and, if so, where do I go to learn it.”

As a user of WordPress, you don’t NEED to learn html, but it can sure come in handy. So, I’m going to tell you, yes you should learn html.

But what is html?

Html is an acronym for hypertext markup language. While that might seem like a mouthful of jargon, it’s actually pretty descriptive. At it’s core, html is ‘markup’. If you’ve been around computers as long as I have, which isn’t likely, you might remember a time when word processors, like WordStar, required that you add code around words that you wanted to make bold, italic, or bigger. So, you would type and little pointy bracket, add a b for bold, and another pointy bracket. Then you would type the words you wanted in bold. Then another pointy bracket, a backslash and b to tell it to stop doing bold. And finally there was another pointy bracket.

We were marking up the text in our documents to add styling. That’s where the ‘markup’ part of that acronym comes from.

What about the hypertext? Well, our old pal Merriam-Webster – the Pint sized online dictionary of choice– defines hypertext as “an arrangement of the information in a computer database that allows a user to get information and to go from one document to another by clicking on highlighted words or pictures”. Ignore the database part of that definition. The important part is being able to go from place to place by clicking on a link. What is a web page without a link? Pretty insulated and mostly useless.

So, with html, we can add links and we can add tags that will add styling to the text. Since the html ‘code’ is defined, we’ll call it a language.

Back in the old days, like 10 years ago or so, websites were written entirely in html. It was fun (if you’re weird, like me) and tedious. 20 years ago, not only was I writing websites in html, but every single element in the page had to be individually styled. Every time I was to use red text, I had to wrap that text in html that made it red. THAT was tedious.

Fortunately, 20 years ago, we were so limited in what web browsers would display, that the coding was not all that huge. Really, we had bold, italic, a few colors, and maybe we could add a picture of rocks as a divider. If you’ve been around long enough, you’ve seen those rocks.

And then we had blinking text, but until the nightmares about that fade, we’ll just pretend blinking text, dancing babies, and flying toasters never happened, ok?

It didn’t take long before someone found a faster, more efficient way to add all of this styling without having to type color=red over and over and over. This is where CSS, or cascading style sheets, comes in to the picture. Now, we can move all of the style information into one document and use the html to just tag the text with things like heading, bold, list item, and such.

But, wait, you thought I was talking about html in this episode! Well, I am, but honestly, html without css is like soup without salt or bikes without pedals. They are integral to one another. Fortunately, you can learn them separately, although you must start with html first to understand css.

Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? Well, it can be, which is why platforms like WordPress, Wix, Weebly and the like are so popular now. You don’t strictly need to know html, or css, to use WordPress to build a website. Why? Because WordPress and the theme designer have done all of the html and css work for you.

So, why might you want or need to know html? Well, on occasion, you’ll need to add some button code to a page or tweak the contents of a widget. Knowing what all that extra code is and what it’s doing can be really helpful.

Or, you might be interested in designing your own theme or just editing a theme, in which case, you’ll really need to know html and css. You can also tell a lot about someone else’s website by looking at the source code for it – all the html that the browser sees. You can also see anything questionable like hidden links to malware sites by looking at your source code.

Some email management services, like Aweber, allow you to put html in your emails you send to your subscribers.

Html is the language of the web, so if you are willing to learn it, you’re going to be able to do a lot more online.

Where to go to learn HTML

Which brings us where to learn html. You can sign up for a college course at your local community college. That will cost you some money, but the accountability will keep you on track and doing the work. Plus you can ask the instructor questions.

If you’re like me, though, you don’t want to wait for the next semester or quarter to start, you don’t want to drive to a class, and you’d like to save some money. There are online courses available for you that are quite good.

My favorite, hands down, is on Coursera. There will be a link to Coursera and the html course I’m recommending. While Coursera has more than one course on html, the one I am recommending is title “Introduction to HTML5” which is created by the University of Michigan and taught by Colleen van Lent, Ph.D.

I’ve worked through most of the css course and most of the html course by Ms van Lent and I am blown away with how good she is as a lecturer. She has clearly mastered the art of teaching. Her teaching style is conversational – yes she uses big words on occasion, but she makes sure to explain them. She makes some of the more difficult concepts easy to grasp. Her explanation of the difference between display block vs inline block vs inline was probably the best I’ve ever come across.

I’ve been doing websites for a very long time now, since about 1997, and I still learned a couple of new things from her courses, or at least new ways of describing them.

I really cannot say enough good things about this course. To make it even more appealing: it’s free! Yes, you can pay a fee and get a certification, but you can also audit the course for free.

I have a local graphic designer friend in town who is adding html to his skill list and I recommended this course to him. He’s tried a couple of other courses, but ended up lost at the start: what is a text editor and how does he use it?

A quick review of the syllabus for the course is:

Week 1 will get you started with intros of what html is and it’s evolution, what browsers are and how to use a text editor to create an html file. It really does start at the basics.

By week 2, you get started on some coding. You’ll learn what html tags are as well as images, hyperlinks and tables. There are plenty of projects to practice on.

Week 3 covers validation, accessibility, hosting, file transfer and more.

As introduction courses go, this one is pretty comprehensive and covers useful skills and tools.

If you want access to an online reference and a free online course, then the w3schools.com is another way to go. W3Schools will walk you through html, concept by concept. It also provides a means for you to play and text code live without using a text editor.

The w3Schools site also acts as a pretty good reference for html.

I mentioned text editors earlier and I have a couple of free recommendtations for you.

A text editor differs from a word processor in that it does not add any extra styling. When you look at a Word document, there is a lot of markup that you don’t see but that helps with the look of the document. Things like headings, bullets, and more. This means that you can’t use a word document to create an html document. There’s just too much extra stuff that Microsoft adds. So, you want a program that only creates text and nothing but text. There are several text editors out there that you can pay money for, but I’ll assume you only want to learn html, not become a web developer. In that case, you don’t need all of the bells and whistles that I use.

For Windows computers, I recommend Notepad++. That’s 2 plus signs. It’s an amazing piece of software and I used it extensively when I still used Windows computers. It’s available from the web as a download.

For Mac, I recommend TextWrangler. While not as powerful as Notepad++ or paid apps, it will do pretty much everything you need it to do. It’s available on the iTunes store.

Links for all of this will be in the show notes on Pint Sized Sites dot com.

I hope you explore html a bit. It’s not as complex or intimidating as programming languages but it comes in mighty handy if you have a website, even something as user friendly and code –lite as WordPress.

That’s all for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. If you have questions or comments, be sure to visit the website at

Pint sized sites dot com / Podcast for links to this episode. You’ll also find show notes with all the links mentioned here and you’ll find all of the earlier episodes, too.

Thanks again for listening! Until next time, I’m Kelli Wise and you’ve been listening to the Pint Sized Podcast – website and WordPress help for small business!

Google Analytics Basics

October 26, 2012 by Kelli

Ever wondered how many people visit your website? Ever wondered how they found your website? Ever wondered what they did once they arrived?

It’s easy to find all of that information. All you need is Google Analytics? I know what some of you are thinking right now:

What the heck are Google Analytics?

Answer: one of the most important tools that any website owner or blogger has to determine the effectiveness and direction of their online marketing.

To be more specific, Google has a set of online tools that will help you track how many people visit your website, how they found your website, what they looked at and how long they stayed. If that doesn’t sound useful to you, please get off the internet right now. Really.

For those of you who would like to know more about Google Analytics – we’re going to kick this off with a primer on using it.

You’ll need a Google account. Maybe you already have a gmail or Google+ account, in which case – you’re good. For the rest of you, you’ll need an account. You can sign up for one at the Analytics home page.

Once you have an account and have logged in, go to the Admin page and add an account. Google will ask for the URL and industry and want you to agree to their terms and conditions. Once you’ve completed all of that, you’ll get a screen with a Tracking ID (usually a UA-number) and some javascript code to paste into your website. Some WordPress themes or plugins only need the tracking ID. For everyone else, you’ll need to add the javascript code into the HEAD section (not the header) of your website. If you are using a static site, this code will go right before the closing </head> tag.

Add the tracking code to your website and save it.

Now head on over to the Analytics page. click on HOME and you’ll see a snapshot of your website traffic.

Why isn’t there any traffic on my website? What happened?

Calm down – Google has just started tracking your website, so it has NO IDEA what happened yesterday or the day before. All of your data will be from this point forward.

What kind of information can you see in Google Analytics?

Let’s take a look at the “Standard Reporting” for a brand new website. This site hasn’t launched yet, so the only traffic we’ll see is the one or two times I’ve visited it while adding the Analytics code.

On the left side of the page, you’ll see a menu where we can drill down on all of the different data available.

Audience – who is visiting your site.

Demographics – what countries are they located in and what languages do they speak

Behavior – are they new here or returning visitors.

Technology – what browsers are they using, what network are they on?

Mobile – how many are using mobile and what devices are they using

Traffic Sources – where are they coming from

Sources – are they here via a link, a search or a direct visit

Search – what search terms led them to you

Google Analytics Graphs

The graphs take up most of the screen and give you a quick visual clue as to how your site is doing. Let’s take a look at what’s here:

A graph of number of visits displayed in Google Analytics That great big graph on the top is the number of VISITS in the last month. You can change it to hourly, daily, weekly or monthly. You can even change the time frame and compare it to a previous time period. As you can see, my new site has only 2 visits today.

Below this big graph, you’ll see a bunch of smaller graphs and a pie chart. That pie chart tells you how many of your visitors were new vs. returning. Click on any one of those little graphs and it will take the place of the Visits chart so you can see the data better.

Visits – this is how many times someone has navigated to any of the pages on your website that have the tracking code installed.

Unique Visitors – If someone visits twice, they will only be counted as one unique visitor.

Pageviews – how many total pages have been viewed. If a page is viewed more than once, it gets counted each time someone looks at it.

Pages/Visit – when someone comes to your site, how many pages do they look at?

Average visit duration – how long does someone linger on your site? If it’s a few seconds, you know that they didn’t find what they were looking for.

Bounce Rate – this is always fun to explain: it is the percentage of visitors who visit your site and “bounce” (leave the site) instead of staying to view other pages.

% New visits – how many of the people haven’t visited your website before

In the next post, we’ll look at a real example and how to interpret some of the results. In the meantime, get started on adding Google Analytics to your site. If you have them already, spend the next couple of days getting familiar with the data available. If you have questions about them, ask in the comments below!

Note – most of this information was previously published in a series of articles on my other blog. http://massagetherapyworld.com/2012/08/google-analytics-part-1/ and http://massagetherapyworld.com/2012/08/google-analytics-part-2-what-does-all-that-data-mean/

WordCamp Seattle – Kelli Wise is presenting

April 17, 2012 by Kelli

If you’re planning on attending WordCamp Seattle next month, you’ll have an opportunity to see just how short I am. You’l also get a chance to hear me speak on

Using WordPress as Your Company’s Website

How to setup and use WordPress as a static website and content management system for small business. Includes setup, theme considerations, giving access to employees.

This is a 30 minute presentation with 10 minutes of Q&A. While it won’t be as in depth as the 12 Weeks to A Website That Works course, it will go over the basics on using WordPress as your company’s Content Management System.

If you’re there, stop me in the hall and say HI! I’d love to meet you.