This is the best value in the WordPress community. I’m offering all my themes, past, present and future for only $50. You get all the themes that I’ve created so far, all updates so you can be sure your theme will always work with the latest version of WordPress, plus all themes that I release in the future. With many sites charging $50 or more per theme, this is an exceptional value.
Plus with Organized Themes you can rest assured that you are buying into a brand that will still be here. I’ve been releasing themes here for close to 2 years already and will continue to. I was among the first developers listed in the WordPress.org commercial theme listing in July 2009. You can be sure that by investing in my themes you are getting the best value out there. So go on and purchase it now!
It’s one of the computing mantras that you hear over and over again–keep regular backups. But how many people do that despite hearing the occasional horror story of losing everything with a hard drive crash or a virus. I’ve always been someone who has good intentions of keeping things backed up, but if I’m left to myself to do them regularly, they often get overshadowed by the more exciting aspects of running my design business. Two weeks ago, I had a personal experience with why having multiple backups can be essential to ensuring your site stays up and functional.
Here’s what happened. It started after I purchased a new plugin for WordPress that allows your site to automatically translate your pages and posts and display them to a user based on their browser’s language settings. Since I get approximately 40% of my visits from countries that are not primarily English speaking, I thought this would be a fantastic way to server my customers. I knew this plugin would make some significant changes to my WordPress database, so I backed up my site with the WP Database Backup plugin, and I used the export function built into WordPress to export my site’s content in case things went wrong. On a Friday night, I set my site to translating, and hit the bed.
When I woke up the next morning, I discovered that all my site’s traffic had been redirected to a non-existant French version of my site. I tried adjusting settings in the plugin, but to no avail. Deactivating the plugin didn’t fix the problem either.
Since I knew I was missing out on sales, I knew I had to act quickly, so I opened up the MySQL admin on my server and tried to restore the backup I had made before using the plugin. It wouldn’t take. I tried two more times, but to no avail. This would have been the simplest way to get things back up and running. All of my site’s settings were contained in that file–widgets, plugins form set up not to mention all my posts, pages and comments. If the backup had restored as planned, then all of this would be instantly corrected and it would be “like it never even happened” to quote ServPRO.
But I wasn’t out yet. I still had the export XML file that I had made. This is a bit different from the database backup in that it only has my site’s content–no settings are included. I created a new database on my server and ran WordPress’ famous 5 minute installer and then imported the XML file. All in all, it took about 20 minutes to get everything back as it had been before the incident took place. It may not have been ideal, but I was able to get my site back up and allow customers to resume purchases in less than a half hour. So what did I learn?
I think we all sometime or another will have a loss of data. If you are good about maintaining a backup routine that includes verifying your backups, you’ll be in good shape when disaster strikes.
The default text widget allows you to not only place text, but HTML code as well. We can use that ability to create a link from a “Read More” button. Here is what the code we will use will look like:
<a href="http://www.yoursite.com/page">Read More
Here’s how to make it work. Go to the widgets menu under appearance and create a text widget where you’d like it to be visible. Copy the code from above and paste it into the widget and save your changes. Next replace the http://www.yoursite.com/page with the address you would like to link to. An easy way to get the url is just to browse to the page and copy the url from the browser address bar. Save your changes and you should be good to go.
If you want to take this up a notch, you can use an image for the link. Just use the add media feature of WordPress to upload the button you’d like to use. Once the upload is complete, copy the URL that appears at the bottom of the resulting dialogue box. Then use code that looks like this:
<a href="http://www.yoursite.com/page">
Now you’ll have an image button that links to the rest of your text. Pretty simple don’t you think?
Over the years I’ve made quite a few sites for churches, and now that I have a portfolio full of WordPress themes for churches, people ask me all the time what plugins I use and recommend for their church sites. To help everyone out, I’ve put together this updated list of what plugins I would recommend for your church site.
This is the most used WordPress plugin and for good reason. It easily adds descriptions and keywords to your site’s content and attempts to make the entire site more search engine friendly. I use it on every site that I set up and think everyone who wants their site to be noticed should too. I will say lately the plugin has begun to have more frequent updates without appearing to change anything and each update requires visiting the settings page to reactivate it. A bit annoying, but I suspect it helps the developer get a few more donations. That’s not too bad considering the plugin is free. You can find out more here.
This another plugin geared to help your site be noticed by search engines. It creates a map to show Google and everyone else where your content is located. It’s a breeze to set up and quietly does its job without getting in your way. Find out more and download it here.
I’ve yet to make a church site that didn’t have some form of map and most of them use Google maps to provide directions as well as a visual. While it’s not hard to embed a Google map, it’s generally not very graceful. Now there is a great WordPress plugin called MapPress that will allow you to not only embed a map, but offer directions via Google directly in your site. It’s a great solution. Learn more and download it here.
Most every church needs some type of contact form, even if it is just for sending a basic message. But contact forms have so much more benefit to churches than just sending in prayer requests. Gravity Forms is by far the best plugin for forms available. Since it’s release this summer, I’ve replaced every contact form on my sites with this elegant solution. Now I can easily create small group sign ups. Allow people to write posts that the church can later publish. I work with a mentoring ministry that is using this plugin to collect information on new mentors. Once the mentor is approved, the data doesn’t have to be re-entered. All that is required is to publish the post the form creates. It’s a great solution that I would recommend to anyone looking for a form. Learn more and purchase it here.
Most churches that use WordPress want to publish a podcast of their messages. While WordPress creates a feed that will work with iTunes, it’s not obvious as to how to add descriptions, categories and images for the iTunes store to use. Podcasting steps in and allows you to easily add those items, plus create posts from any category to include in your podcast feed. The plugin is easy to use and is a fix and forget it solution. You can find it here.
Most churches use email newsletters as a means to communicate. While there are many companies out there you can use, I really like MailChimp. They provide a great set of tools that are constantly being improved. They have great looking templates, or you can create your own. Plus the best part is their mailing list is free for up to 500 users and 6 email campaigns per month. For many churches that will be all they need. Plus if you exceed that amount, their prices are more than competitive. They also provide another great plugin called Analytics360 that provides an great view on your Google Analytics data that charts how your email campaigns and posts affect your traffic. You can download Analytics 360here and MailChimp’s sign up here.
You have to keep track of visitors to your site, otherwise you’ll never know if you are being successful or not. There are lots of plugins that can add analytics features to your site, but I like Google Analyticator because it allows you to remove logged in administrators from the tracking. That way you’re only seeing true visitors and not just yourself. Plus it conveniently adds a dashboard widget to show you recent visitors. As an added bonus, this graph isn’t Flash so you can see it even if you view your dashboard from an iPhone. You can download Google Analyticator here.
Mobile devices are here to stay and people expect to be able to view your site from their phones. Personally I believe this is especially true of any place that has a physical location that people visit like a church. If someone is in traffic and they see a bumper sticker with your church’s website on it, they may just look it up while they wait at a red light. If you site can’t be viewed on their phone, they’re not going to bother with it. The WPTouch plugin allows you to easily create a mobile device compatible version of your site. This is a mature plugin that is updated frequently. There are other alternatives out there or you could just make your own, but this is so simple and effective why bother. You can download it here.
So these are the plugins that I always use with a church’s website. Did I leave any of your favorites out? Leave a comment so we can all discover some more great resources.
I’ve been hard at work on a new theme to be released quite soon, but I can’t resist showing you a bit of what it will look like. I’m calling this one Media Theme. It is going to be available in two versions: one for businesses or individuals, the other for churches. It will feature a built in image rotator that can be swapped for a video player on the front page. Many businesses and churches like the option of having several large clickable buttons to link key areas of the site from the front page. Media Theme will feature three large customizable buttons on the right of the main image rotator.
All colors will be customizable from the control panel without having to touch any code. It will also feature easy connectivity to social media as well. Take a look at the snapshot that I’ve uploaded here. Look for this great theme to be available before November begins.
I want to thank all of my incredible customers for making August 2009 the best month in the history of Organized Themes. The two for the price of one birthday special was such a great success, that you can expect to see it around for some time to come.
Here is what is coming up:
Thanks again for making this such an incredible month.
Ever wondered how many people visited your site last week? Would you believe you can find out information like that for absolutely free? Google offers a tremendous product called Analytics that you can use to keep track of visitors. You simply sign up at analytics.google.com and they will provide you with some code for your site and you’re ready to get started.
First you will need to get the code onto your site. Joost de Valk has created a simple plugin that does just that called Google Analytics for WordPress. Simply install the plugin and enter your id number into the field and Google will begin tracking information about all your visitors.
When I first began using WordPress, this was one of the first things I did for my sites and those of my clients, but there was always a big drawback–you couldn’t find out about your visitors without going to Google. I did everything else inside of WordPress, but I couldn’t find out my stats without leaving my site altogether. Thankfully that has changed.
Now the online newsletter company, Mail Chimp, has commissioned a great plugin called analytics 360 that brings the best of Google’s details right into my WordPress admin. Now you can see from right inside WordPress how many visitors you’ve had, where they came from, what they looked at, how long they stayed and so on. If you are a Mail Chimp user, they also plot the growth of your subscription list.
One unique feature analytics 360 adds by integrating into WordPress is showing the relationship between your posts and your visitors. Of course you could figure out that inside of Google, but they won’t plot it for you.
So if you haven’t tried Google Analytics, sign up for a free account today and then install analytics 360. Your blog will thank you.
