As always, for security purposes, it’s highly recommended that you keep your WordPress installation up to date:

• If you’re on our VaultPress + Monthly Maintenance package, your WordPress installation has already been updated by us. No need to worry about a thing… carry on as you were
• If you’re on our VaultPress only package, you can update your WordPress installation yourself using the automatic update option in your dashboard. VaultPress is already keeping real-time backups of your site, so no need to perform a separate manual backup before updating.
• If you don’t have Vaultpress installed, please please do a manual backup of your WordPress files and database before updating WordPress via the automatic update option in the dashboard. While the auto-update usually works just fine, every so often (about 10% of the time) something will go wrong, usually as a result of a plugin incompatibility, and a backup is vital in these situations. Contact us if you need help with this process.

It’s not an unreasonable amount at all, but at that particular point in time, not really having earned very much yet from my own business, it may as well have been £250,000 for all that I could afford it. They didn’t offer the option to pay the membership fee monthly, unfortunately, or I probably would have jumped at that – just over £20 per month was infinitely more affordable than a lump-sum upfront payment.

In retrospect, I’m kinda glad that I didn’t scrape together the money to join the networking organisation. I’ve met many of the people who belong to it at other functions and they’re all lovely people, but the style of networking involved was too formal for me. I’ve decided to be at peace with the fact that I’m not a ‘magic minute’ kind of girl!

But I digress.

My experience with the whole heart-sinking, jaw-dropping, you-want-me-to-pay-what-upfront?! process isn’t unique amongst small businesses, especially not in the first few months of operation. Sometimes, finding a whole big chunka cash for something just isn’t feasible no matter how much you’d like it to be so. Smaller monthly payments, on the other hand? Perfect.

The weird thing is, I never thought to apply this to my own business at first – for some reason, in my head, a website was something you paid for upfront. In our case, we ask people for a 50% deposit at the start of a project, and 50% upon completion, which breaks things up somewhat, but which can also still work out to two large amounts.

I’m happy to report, however, that my brain finally came to the party and that we now offer a pay-monthly option for our web design services… the Monthly Marvin! (For some background on “Who on earth is Marvin?!” click here.)

There will still be a deposit involved, though less at 25%. And, as is usually the case with pay-monthly options, the total cost will work out a wee bit higher than if you paid upfront, though we’re not here to exploit anyone by charging exorbitant fees. What we are here to do, is get small businesses like you the heck onto the web so that you can start expressing your brilliance online and making those big dreams come true! I feel very passionately about this, and can’t stand to see small businesses settling for either no web presence or an inferior one simply as a result of a (too) high cost barrier.

Regardless of whether you choose to pay upfront or monthly, you’ll also have the option to add on our monthly maintenance package, which offers real-time backups of your site, regular WordPress and plugin updates, and free troubleshooting assistance in event of anything going wrong with your site.

You also won’t miss out on membership of our Noodle Bar if you choose to pay monthly. We’ll simply allocate your points on a monthly basis instead, and your discount rate will increase accordingly as well.

Any questions? Contact us, and we’ll be glad to answer them!

You can update using the automatic update feature on your WordPress dashboard. If you choose to do this, please remember to backup your database and WordPress files first. If you need any help with backing up your site and updating WordPress, contact us.

You can update your version of WordPress directly from your dashboard using the automatic update feature, but please remember to backup your site before you do! (If you’re not sure about making manual backups, you should consider signing up for our VaultPress backup service.)

If you need any help with backups and updating, please contact us.

WordPress has just beaten Joomla and Drupal to win this year’s Open Source CMS Hall Of Fame Award. Those of us who work with WordPress every day know exactly how powerful the software is as a Content Management System, and it’s fantastic to see WordPress getting more and more recognition for this and moving away from being thought of as ‘just’ a blogging platform.

To find out how WordPress can help your small business reach its big dreams, contact us today.

So many people have blocks when it comes to technology. For various reasons, people shy away from ‘tech stuff’, thinking they don’t have the knowledge or skills required. It can be a crippling place to be when you’re running your own business and a large part of what you need to do involves running your website and being online.

I hate the idea of people feeling powerless or not in control of their own website.

That’s part of the reason why I gravitated towards setting up websites for people using WordPress. It’s easy to use and gives people control over their own sites. I’m simply not the kind of web designer/developer who likes to keep her clients technologically disempowered so that every single little thing they want to do with their website has to come through me.

It’s also largely the reason why I’m in the process of releasing a range of ‘do-it-yourself’ guides related to various aspects of setting up and using WordPress to run a small business website. The first guide has just been launched, and it deals with the very beginning stages of setting up a WordPress-based website. Over the next few months, I’ll be releasing guides related to the other stages of the process, such as the design of the site, plugins, using WordPress as a Content Management System, integrating WordPress with social media, RSS feeds, Search Engine Optimisation, WordPress security, site optimisation, and site statistics.

(If you have any subjects related to using WordPress for a small business site that you’d like to see covered in addition to those mentioned above, please let me know!)

These DIY tutorials are written specially for people with minimal knowledge of technology (though people with more knowledge will benefit as well). Usually, when subject experts write tutorials they leave out huge chunks of assumed knowledge – I’m often quite surprised at how full of holes so-called ‘WordPress for beginners’ tutorials are! As a result, people trying to follow these tutorials often end up getting themselves into a bigger mess than they were before they started.

I’ve always been able to explain things to people really simply and in language that they’ll understand, bringing order to the chaos of confusion . I used to assume that everyone could do this, but based on feedback I’ve received over the years have come to realise that it’s a natural skill that I have, which can be put to good use to help people. I like to think of myself as a translator, from geek to good ol’ plain English!

It’s my sincere hope that these DIY WordPress guides provide value to you. As always, they’re one of the ways in which I aim to help small businesses achieve their big dreams .

Visit the DIY Resources page

You know how it goes… you think to yourself, “Self! How about trying out a new theme on this here blog o’ mine?!” So you perform the old theme switcheroo, only to notice something a tad disturbing: your sidebar widgets have disappeared.

“Eek!” you think, followed swiftly by, “Well, I’ll just switch back to my original theme and all will be right with the world again! This new theme isn’t actually right for me anyway and I prefer my original design!”

So, the reverse switcheroo happens in double quick time. But: still no sidebar widgets!

It’s like the widget equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle… when you change WordPress themes, your precious widgets seemingly disappear. And changing back to your original theme doesn’t always bring the widgets back from the ether.

The reason why this happens is that each theme uses unique IDs for its sidebars, and widgets are ‘attached’ to specific sidebars. When you change themes, the new theme therefore doesn’t recognise the widgets in the old sidebar because the old sidebar’s ID doesn’t exist in the new theme.

The widgets aren’t really lost – often they’re found lurking in the inactive widgets area and need to be dragged back into the sidebar. Easy enough if you only have a couple of widgets, but reconstructing an elaborate sidebar can be a pain. Sometimes, too, things go wrong in the whole process, and widgets end up floating free or otherwise stuck and inaccessible.

It can be a frustrating experience, to say the least.

Enter the Widget Saver plugin!

The Widget Saver plugin, developed by Zorgbargle specially for Phenomenoodle, is a godsend when switching back and forth between themes by allowing you to save your widgets for your current theme before changing to a new theme. In the event that you then return to your original theme only to find your widgets still missing, you can use the restore function to return your initial theme sidebar to its original state. In worst case scenarios where widgets become stuck, you can use the plugin’s reset function to remove all widgets and return to factory defaults.

Because of the little issue of different sidebar IDs in different themes, the Widget Saver plugin won’t unfortunately allow you to magically transport your sidebar widgets from one theme to another. But it will make life much more pleasant for those times when you want to try out new themes on your blog by keeping your original widget settings in a safe place for you until you return.

You can read more about the Widget Saver plugin and download it via our Free Resources page.

Have your image, video, audio, and other media buttons stopped working? Are you clicking on them, but nothing’s happening? Is your visual editor showing html tags rather than a WYSIWYG interface?

Aha! You, my friend, are probably experiencing a case of too-many-page-revisions-itis.

How can you tell if this is indeed the cause of your non-responsive buttons and suddenly non-visual visual editor? Scroll down your WordPress editing screen: Does it end abruptly after the Page Revisions box heading, like this…

… when it should be looking more like this…

That’s a sure sign that you have too many page revisions in your database, which has thrown its metaphorical hands up in the air at your penchant for constant change and gone to sulk in the corner, leaving your editing page only partly loaded and partly working.

The solution

The solution is a two part one: First, you need to clear all your old page revisions out of your database, and secondly, you need to take steps to manage your page revisions to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Let’s look at each part in turn.

Part 1: Remove old page revisions from the database

Firstly, as is good practice when making any significant changes to your site, backup your database.

Then, do the following yourself or grab a geek and ask them to do the following:

Open phpMyAdmin, select your database and run the following command:

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";

This will delete all post revisions in your database. You can also tailor the command to only delete post revisions for specific pages if you prefer.

Part 2: Manage your page revisions

Even if you haven’t experienced the panic and confusion that can set in when your WordPress editing screen stops working as it should, I’d recommend doing one of the following to manage your page revisions before they do become a problem. Prevention, as the ubiquitous “they” say, is always better than cure, after all.

Option 1:
Add the following line to your wp-config.php file:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS',10);

Replace 10 with the number of revisions that you want the database to store for each page.

Option 2:
Install the Revision Control plugin to manage the number of page revisions for your site as a whole or on a page-by-page basis.

It represents a major update from previous versions of the software, so that means it’s time to upgrade your installation if you haven’t yet done so. You can do this quite easily from your WordPress dashboard, but please, please, oh pretty please remember to backup your site before you get all giddy on the excitement of a one-click update

For the most part, upgrades to WordPress 3.0 have been progressing smoothly, but some people have experienced problems. If you end up being one of the unlucky few to have bugs come a’crawling through your upgrade party, WordPress has been keeping a list of all the common issues and solutions with WordPress 3.0.

Self-hosted blogs

If you already have a website for your business, or are about to create one, the most obvious place to put a blog would be on your own website. Because you are hosting your blog on your site, this option is often referred to as a self-hosted blog.

To run a blog on your website, you need blogging software to power it. And the best blogging software out there is WordPress. I’m not just saying that because I’m a WordPress developer and set up websites for people using this software. Rather, it a case of me choosing to work with WordPress because it’s such an excellent product. WordPress has become very powerful over the years that it’s been around, and it can in fact power your entire website as a Content Management System, regardless of whether you have a blog on it or not. I often set up sites for people like this, with nary a blog in sight!

The WordPress software itself is free of charge, and to use it to set up a blog on your website, you will need to toddle along to WordPress.org to download and install it on your website. Some web hosts (like Hostgator) also offer an easy install of the WordPress software via Fantastico.

Either way, the process is fairly simple, although some technical knowledge can come in handy, particularly if you’re doing a manual install of the software. Please don’t let this put you off setting up a blog this way, though – as you’ll see in a second, having your blog on your own website has some very important benefits that far outweigh this small (possible) disadvantage.

Free blogging services

If you don’t have your own website, another way to set up a blog is to use one of the free services offered by the companies who develop blogging software. In this case, instead of your blog being hosted on your own website, it is hosted on the free services website.

WordPress offers this option at WordPress.com. The other biggie in this arena is Blogger. If you visit those sites, you’ll see that the process of setting up a blog there literally takes a few seconds: you fill in a brief form, and – voila! – you have a blog.

Now, in comparison to the first option with its extra technical knowledge requirements, this sounds like a Godsend. But… (why is there always a ‘but’?!)… because these services are free to use and so quick and easy to set up, they tend to attract two types of blogs: one is personal blogs, people’s online journals about what they get up to, and the second is spam blogs, also referred to as splogs (that’s probably the only funny thing about them!).

I’m a bit wary of throwing a business blog into that mix.

It’s fine if people already know you, like you and trust you, but for people who find your blog via a search engine query it can be difficult to distinguish your blog from the other thousands of blogs that all look exactly the same as yours – you’re all using the same free templates provided by the service for your blog design, so your business blog looks the same as a few thousand spam blogs and a few thousand personal blogs.

It’s not impossible to run a very professional business blog from one of these free services, but you’re sure starting off on the wrong foot and giving yourself a tad more work to do to convince your site visitors that you are, in fact, a genuine, legitimate business.

If you can, use the self-hosted option

All these disadvantages of the free blogging services fall away when you host your blog on your own website: you own your domain, and you can customise and brand the heck out of it (tastefully of course!).

In short, you’re in control over the impression that you provide to people finding your site via the search engines. It’s easier for you to demonstrate your integrity to them, and consequently easier for them to enter into a trust relationship with you.

[This blog post is based on a presentation I did for local businesses at the East Lothian Coffee Morning on 23 April 2010. You can download the slides from that presentation from the East Lothian Council.]