1. You have time one day to write a bunch of posts, but don’t want them all to be published the same day in order to keep your readers’ attention piqued
2. You are going on vacation and would like a post or two or more to appear while you are gone
3. You have a section of your website which is updated daily, and you would like to sit down and do a big entry on one day and have each post appear on different days
4. You are going to have a special promotion, so you get your posts and pages all set for a particular date

There are many reasons to post into the future and WordPress makes it super easy.  One of my clients, Crossfit Mount Kisco, posts a Workout of the Day every single day.  Andrew or Kevin at Crossfit Mount Kisco sits down at the beginning of the week and maps out their entire plan for the week by creating posts for each day’s workout. Then, instead of clicking “Publish” to make these workouts available right away, he instead “schedules” the post to appear on a particular day, at a particular time.  This is a BRILLIANT way for two busy men to handle this important part of their business ahead of time!  On the home page, the most recent post appears, which happens to be the workout for TODAY. Tomorrow, when tomorrow is today, that workout will appear first, and so on. Check the Workout of the Day postings in action here!

Here’s how to do this:

1. Login to WordPress
2. Click Posts on the left navigation
3. Choose Add New
4. Title your post with a good title
5. Write your post/add photos/etc.
6. Add your post to the proper category and add tags
7. NOW:  Above the PUBLISH button, Click Edit next to “Publish immediately”
8. Change the date and time here then click the OK button
9. Now you will see the PUBLISH button now says SCHEDULE.
   Go ahead and click Schedule

If you need to change the date again, that is no problem.  You are not set in stone with this date. You can change it at any time.

In fact, you can change the date on ANY of your posts at any time.  This means you can even back date your posts!  Sometimes when I set up a new website for someone and they have newsletter articles that they have written in the past, we will convert these to blog postings and I will back date the article to the date that they actually wrote the article. For example, see Foster’s Landscaping. We took their old PDF newsletters and converted each article to a blog post, backdating the article to the original newsletter date instead of the date we built the website. Brilliant.

This is one more neat little feature of WordPress.  I hope you are able to take advantage of this.

I work with many business owners who have a self-hosted WordPress installation, and who are gung-ho about adding a blog to their website.  We set up the blog area, they write a few posts, and then they stop.  Eventually, the blog or news area looks outdated which is not good for bringing in new business. There are several solutions to this issue if you are not finding the time to post:

1. Ask someone/a few employees in your company to write posts
2. Ask other people who are experts in your field to guest blog. You can set up those users as contributors in WordPress.
3. Hire a content writer
4. Make it easy to post 

Here we are going with number 4 – Make it easy to post by using your iPhone!

Why is it easier to post using your iPhone?  You probably have your phone with you at all times. If you are are out and about in your workplace, you can quickly log in, write a paragraph or two, and snap a photo right there. No sitting down that the computer, hooking up a camera and downloading/uploading images for the post, no big production.  Blog postings don’t always need to be long and cumbersome.  Sometimes there is a need for a longer post and of course, and your computer is easier for writing long postings with a lot of links.  If you are always writing long posts, you may get back into that pattern of not posting at all because it becomes a big chore.  I would like you to change your mindset on some of your posts and think about writing some short and to the point articles with great content that your constituents WANT to read.  Shorter, in some cases, is better all around for posting and reading.

Here is how to post to your WordPress website using your iPhone. Note that this article is directed at users with their own self-hosted WordPress installation.  I am not sure how websites on WordPress.com works, but it may be similar.

How to Post to your WordPress Blog Using your iPhone

1. Touch the App Store on your iPhone
2. Touch the Search icon at the bottom of the screen
3. At the top of the screen in the white search bar, type WordPress and then click the blue Search button
4. The top choice should be WordPress by Automattic – touch that app (I know I need 31 updates!)
5. Touch the button that says FREE
6. Touch the same button after it changes to INSTALL
7. Enter your Apple ID Password and Enter
8. You should now have a new icon on your iPhone for WordPress
9. Touch that icon and you will be prompted to set up your account on this phone.
10. Touch Add a Self-Hosted Blog
11. On the next screen, you will be prompted to fill out the URL which is your website address, your username and your password.  You can turn geotagging on or off.  Touch Done and then Save. You don’t need to put http:// before the website address in the URL field.  You can if you want to but you don’t need to
12. You will be directed to a page that lists all of your current posts.  Touch the little navigation button at the top left of the screen (it looks like three horizontal bars) to view all of your options. Touch it again to close your options.
13. To add a new post, touch the plus icon at the top right of the screen
14. If you have turned geotagging ON you will be prompted with a question: “WordPress” Would Like to Use Your Current Location.  Choose OK to let WordPress tag where you are writing this post
15. In the Title area, choose a good title for your post
16. After tags, add some tags
17. Touch the area in Categories and you will be presented with options of your current categories. After you tick off all the categories that this post should appear in, click New Post at the top left to go back to the post you are composing
18. In the area which says Tap here to begin writing, go ahead and put some text.
19. Adding photos is super important for making a post nice and intriguing.    To add a photo, touch the icon which looks like a photo of a moon and mountains at the bottom right of your screen.  Either Add Photo from Library that you already took, or Take a Photo.  You will be presented with a menu to insert a Small, Medium, Large, or Original size.  You will need to play with the correct size for your website, but Medium should be a good option. Make sure you test this and look at the post on a computer.  If you have a photo that is too large, it may go off the page and make your post look horrible!  So test this!
20. After the photo is uploaded, you will need to click the pencil icon at the bottom left of the screen to go back to writing your post.
21. Don’t freak out about the coding that appears.  That won’t appear on your post!  Continue to write your post.
22. If you need to have a link in the text, bold some text, italicize or quote text, touch and hold down a word that needs to be linked, bolded, quoted, or underlined and up will come a new menu where you can select the text you need to change.  Click Select and you will be presented with “handles” that you can drag over more words to include more words in the link, bold, etc. If you choose Link, you will see a popup box asking you to type the Link URL and then click insert.
23. If this post is good, you can preview it by touching the icon that looks like an eye at the bottom of the screen (see the image above it is the third icon in from the left).  When you are ready, touch the Publish button at the top right of the screen.
24. Your post is now live!  If you need a Featured Image for this post, unfortunately that capability is not available on the iPhone app.
25. Most importantly – get to a computer at some point and test this!

To add another blog, go ahead and touch the navigation button on the top right (looks like three horizontal lines), then choose Settings at the bottom. You will see an option to Add a Blog. Go through the same steps to add another blog you post to.

Now you should be all set to post all the time on the fly.  Good luck and get writing!

Well, it could be the fonts!  Fonts play a SUPER important role in how a person feels or reacts to a website.  Fonts create a feeling for the page, whether it be strong, soft, romantic, funny, serious, conservative, playful, happy, or one of many other emotions. When you are working on your website, I encourage you to pay particular attention to the fonts chosen to create the emotional reaction you desire from your visitors.

For many years, we web designers were limited to a small number of fonts for designing.  One of the reasons for this is that if a font from a website is to display on a visitor’s screen, the visitor must have that font installed on his or her computer.  This can be challenging as each computer has different fonts installed.  Recently two major revolutions have been made in the world of fonts and websites:  Google Web Fonts and Adobe Typekit.  Now there are hundreds of choices for your site!

But be careful!  Too many fonts on one page looks messy.  You should use 2-3 fonts on a page, sometimes a few more if you can get away with it.  We like to use a nice dramatic font for the titles of our pages and our headings, and an easy to read font for the body text.  If you can focus on finding complimentary fonts, you will be successful.  Here is a great article on how to choose fonts that compliment each other.

Years ago I found this fun infographic on how to choose a font. Check it out.

Take a look at a sample of websites below to view their fonts, and see if you get a different feeling immediately from the typeface chosen.

Aunt Sassy Sauces
Norwalk Education Foundation
My News Girl
TR Building & Remodeling
Sample Site

If you are looking to change your website a bit, contact us and maybe a font change is all you need!

Many other clients follow a philosophy, and there are many wonderful quotes from influential people that they would like to display on their site as well.

Typically, testimonials and quotes are handled by listing them on a page together, so that visitors to a website can scroll down a list and read them. This is fine for some applications, but not for all.  The reason is simple: the testimonials or quotes may not have relevance, or meaning, if listed on a page. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that in many cases, listing testimonials or quotes on a page is important. But there are many cases when we can make the testimonials or quotes more powerful and meaningful if we put them in the right spot: right where your web visitor is.

So how can you do this?  I will give you a few examples:

Montessori School of Redding

The Montessori School of Redding follows the philosophy of Maria Montessori, who was prolific with her quotes!  Instead of listing a page of quotes, we decided to put one quote at a time in the header of her site!  And the wonderful thing about this, is that they are not hard coded in, but instead, random. So if you browse to a page, you will see another quote, and if you go back to the page you were just on, you will see another quote.  This lets the visitor to the site view many quotes while on the site, and they are used as a “base” of the site to uphold the entire site, as opposed to being a “thing” that people need to search out.  These quotes are central to the entire way students are taught there, and they are central to each page of the Montessori website.  This was done using Quotes Collection plugin on the Montessori’s WordPress website.

Banquets at Italian Center

Many people choose the Italian Center of Stamford to host their wedding, corporate meeting, picnic, or other special event.  They have so many testimonials from clients that they wished to display on their site.  In keeping with this same theme, what we did was add all of the quotes into the back end of their WordPress website.  Next, we categorized each by type of event.

On each event page, as the visitor is browsing the site, they will see random, fading testimonials from customers who had that type of event at the Italian Center.  The quote is directly related to the type of event page that the website visitor is on.  This makes the quote relevant and meaningful.

Do you have quotes or testimonials that you would like to display on your website? Contact TechCare, LLC today so we can display your great content on your site now.

This is the type of menu you now can find on many shopping websites, such as llbean.com, officemax.com, staples.com, or target.com.  If you go to one of those sites and mouseover the main menu, you will see a huge menu drop down or fly out, with lots of well organized links.

When you have a site with tons of content and need to organize it so that visitors to the site can find what they want easily and quickly, you need an UberMenu or a MegaMenu.

Many of my clients do not need this type of menu because their site does not contain so many pages, or we find a way to organize their content under a few main menu items.  Recently, though, I had the pleasure of building the Italian Center of Stamford’s website, and they did not fit the “typical” client profile.

The Italian Center of Stamford is a:

• Fitness Center
• Group Exercise Center
• Youth Program Center
• Outdoor Tennis Facility
• Platform Tennis Facility
• Outdoor Swimming Facility
• Swim Lesson and Swim Team Facility
• Social Club
• Cultural Center
• Banquet Facility
• Nursery School
• Summer Camp
• Vacation Week Camp Facility

How to organize all of this information?  Uber Menu.

When I first met with the Italian Center, we put all of the content that needed to be included on the new site down on paper.  Then it was my job to figure out how to organize all of the pages so that users could find what they needed to right away.  I also wanted to let new visitors to the site know what the Italian Center has to offer right away without making visitors search.

The Uber Menu plugin was our solution.  This plugin is easily downloaded and installed into a WordPress website.  I then was able to style the menu so it fit the look and feel of their site.

Please take a look at the Uber Menu in action on most of the drop down menus on the Italian Center’s website.  You will see that you get a snapshot of what the facility is all about right away and that you feel confident surfing their site.

If you are interested to know if an Uber Menu can help your website, please contact us below.  Or, leave your thoughts about the Uber Menu for us to share with others!  We think that the Uber Menu is pretty cool, and we’d love to hear what you think!

There are many ways to create video content for your website.  You could hire a specialized company which will create a stunning, professional video or you could attempt to create one yourself. Many times, a video will be thought of as “a nice idea” but will not be put into practice for a myriad of reasons:  hiring a professional company may be out of the budget, people are nervous to be in front of a camera, some are nervous the video quality will be inferior, or they do not have the correct equipment such as a tripod or light kit.  The reasons are endless why businesses are not creating more video content.

One of our clients found a perfect solution that enabled them to create a professional video without all of the issues above.   Systems4PT, is a company which develops software for Physical Therapy offices so that the Physical Therapy office may go paperless. One feature of their software is a rules flow that will automatically enter the proper insurance billing codes for each insurance company as therapists are entering in their data about patients.  This feature of their software is called PayTrend™.

Are you using video on your website to promote your brand, give more detail, or create excitement?  Now is the time to use video to your advantage.

Recently, views of video online has increased dramatically. This is due to the evolution of the web, the evolution of Internet access, speed and bandwidth provided by ISPs (Internet Service Providers), the price reduction of point and shoot cameras, the inclusion of video camera in our phones, and the ease of making videos using software such as Windows Movie Maker, iMovie, or screencast programs such as Jing.

And people are watching.  We love video.  comScore, a company which measures the digital world, recently reported that “that 181 million U.S. Internet users watched nearly 40 billion videos of online video content in January.”  Interesting.

So what does this mean for you?  It means that if you can think of a way to showcase a feature of your business, explain a product, or create excitement, you should create a video for your site as well.

Contact TechCare, LLC to learn how we can create some video content together to create more excitement for your brand!

TechCare, LLC is looking to hire a part time website creator to participate in delivering sites to companies, schools, agencies, and organizations.  Candidates must have the following abilities:

• HTML – Read and Code
• CSS – Read and Code
• Photoshop – create and edit full sites and images
• WordPress – Maintain and use themes and plugins, backup, manage menus and widgets
• FTP programs
• Knowledge of DNS records (A, MX)
• Familiarity with cPanel
• Most importantly:  Positive Mental Attitude

This position is for 10 hours a week.  Days may be flexible.

Office is located in Redding, CT.  All work at least initially will be performed on site in the office.  Eventually some off-site/remote work may be possible.

In addition to submitting a resume, candidates should submit sample websites they have designed/programmed.  These websites may be representative of legitimate companies or fake companies.

Please submit resume and questions to:

Jennifer Carello
jcarello@techcarellc.com

You may have heard the saying, “Your data is only as good as your backup.”  This is very true, even in the case of your web hosting.

Doesn’t backup come with my hosting?

Most service providers do not back up your site. The reason for this is simple:  each type of site needs to be backed up in a different way.  Your WordPress site needs to be backed up in two ways: the database AND the file structure.      Not all websites need this exact way to back up.

Do I have to back up?

For the most part, you should not have an issue with your site. Your site is being hosted by a reputable, global service provider and is probably spread across redundant servers in case of power outage.

You may never need to restore your site.  All updates may go along as planned and no one may ever hack into your site.  Your host may never pack up and declare bankruptcy.

You can liken backing up to wearing a seat belt in the car:  99.99% (this is just a guess, I don’t know the REAL statistic) you drive in a car you do not need your seat belt.  But on that slight chance that this is the drive that you do need it, do you take that risk of not wearing it?

What types of things could happen to my site?

Last year I had a client that had a website hacked into.  What happened is that someone/people figured out their FTP username and password and uploaded tons of links to the bottom of all of their pages.  Those links led to sites that would install spyware and viruses on other computers.  If someone maliciously breaks into your site, your site could be compromised.   Google caught on and semi-blocked their site.  Thankfully I had a backup, and older one, but a backup of the files on my computer I was able to restore.

Recently, a college of mine had a client who was maintaining their WordPress site and saw a notice to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress.  We are not sure what happened, but we think that the employee may have chosen to upgrade but then before it was finished, cancelled out and so the upgrade was ½ complete.   Any person who works with software know that this is a bad situation:  ½ the files one version, ½ the files another version.  Needlesstosay, the site was inaccessible.  Some major work was needed to get the site back up and running.

WordPress is constantly being updated: there are new revisions out every few months.  In addition, plugins are being updated on an ongoing basis, in addition to your theme and/or framework. Most of the time, these upgrades are easy and painless.  Sometimes, they are not.  The possibility is real that a plugin or WordPress update may break your site.

You want to be prepared with a plan to restore what could be lost in case of such an emergency.

Backup options

You can back up manually or automatically.  Backing up manually entails logging into the back end of the system and clicking a button to choose to backup website. TechCare would never recommend a manual backup system as the ongoing method of backup.  This backup is fine when you need to run a back up once in a while for special purpose or for archive purposes, but not on an ongoing basis. This is not our recommendation.

TechCare recommends an automatic backup system.  Automatic backups will run whether you are logged into the system or not.  They can be set to run once a day, once a week, or once a month depending on the software you are using.  TechCare recommends this method of backing up your WordPress website.

Choosing a solution – Pros and Cons explained

Now is the time to choose a solution that is right for your business and for your website.  Make a decision by weighing the options below.  The right solution for your site will probably come down to ease of use, ease of restore, and price.  Below is a list of some of the software on the market and the pros and cons explained.  Contact TechCare, LLC today to get one of these methods set up for the security of your site. Recommended solutions are starred below.

When looking at pricing, please remember that if your site is lost, you need to pay someone to get it back.  Usually that is an hourly fee.  If you pay $200/year for backup that is easy for someone to restore, you have saved yourself much of the labor and frustration costs.

There are so many choices the answer to this is like saying, “What kind of apple should I use for baking in my apple pie?”  Sure, there are certain considerations for the apples:  are they firm?  mushy?  tart?  sweet?   large?  Many people have different opinions on this.  But, if you choose an apple, bake it with some nice brown sugar and spices with a super buttery crust, it will come out pretty good and people will love it.

The same applies to hosting, in my mind.  Although, there are a few things that I personally look for in a web host, and I recommend that my clients do the same.  Here are my top four requirements for picking a good host:

1. Does your host allow you to register unlimited domains for the same price?  You may not believe this, but some day you may want to register your child’s website, a new venture you are going to be part of, or a personal blogging site.  Just make sure you have the room to grow in case you need it.
2. Is the host on the backbone of the Internet?  If your pages are not served up quickly, people will move on.  You need a host that has great throughput.
3. Does this host have a great control panel?  There are a few known good control panels.  Make sure the host you are looking at is using a control panel that will let you easily manage email accounts, domain information, billing, FTP accounts, software installs, etc.  It will make your life much easier in the long run.
4. Pricing:  compare the pricing and what you get or don’t get for each plan.  Sometimes there are so many options in the basic plan that you don’t need.  Make sure that you are paying for what you get and you are not paying for things you don’t need.  Compare the options first.
5. Support:  Probably one of the most important….is there a number to call?  Are the support hours long?  Where in the world are the support teams located?  This will pay for itself in spades if your site is hacked, broken, or when you need help!

I have used different hosts in the past.  Right now I am referring people to bluehost.com.  My site is hosted there.  If you are looking for a host, click the link below to be sent over there.  With the link below, you will get the same great rates from bluehost.com but you will be supporting TechCare as well!

Disclosure: We are a professional review site that receives compensation from the companies whose products we review. We test each product thoroughly and give high marks to only the very best. We are independently owned and the opinions expressed here are our own.