For a few years now I’ve been teaching ‘WordPress for Beginners’ at Hills Road College. From September 2020 I taught a 10-week course via Zoom, thanks to the pandemic, and will be offering this online for the foreseeable future. Visit the Hills Road Adult Education pages and search for ‘WordPress’ to find course details. The…
Small local shops are facing challenges like never before during the Covid-19 pandemic. So are the big ones, but they have marketing departments and other infrastructure to help them cope. As a small shop or local business you’re facing a situation where your usual and loyal customers are self-isolating and you’re not getting any passing…
When planning your site here are some useful links for you to check out. Comparing the hosted options Make a Website Hub reviews the choices between the hosted options below. Visit their sites to check out the current offers and pricing plans: Wix Weebly Squarespace WordPress.com WordPress: .com and .org WordPress.com and WordPress.org are easily…
Basic overview For a website you need four main things: the content for your site – images, text, etc hosting: a place (on a server) to keep it where it can be kept safe web address: the url starting with www. that is the place where people can find your site when they browse the…
Who will be managing your site? At the planning stage it’s crucial to consider who will be managing your site. Think about what staff/time resources you’ll have to keeping it updated in the longer term. Ask yourself: Who will update the content? Are they volunteers or paid staff? Is their position secure or is the…
Do you even need a site? Maybe your client group’s online communication takes place almost exclusively via a couple of specific apps or social media sites such as twitter or facebook. You should certainly ‘be where they are’ but you should consider a website as well. Even if you don’t communicate with your clients using…
In December 2018 Gutenberg – the new WordPress – editor finally launched and changed how we edit WordPress sites. It is intended to make the editing process easier, more intuitive and more fun for general users. I’m a fan – I think it’s a step in the right direction and makes editing easier and clearer.…
Google has now started charging, or at the least taking credit card details, in order to let you use their API key to add their maps to your site. You can read more about that here in this useful blog post from High Rise Digital. It’s still possible to add a google map for free,…
Sometimes you want a gap between two blocks. When you have an image that has text from a particular paragraph block wrapped around it you may not want the following paragraph text block to wrap as well. Separating blocks can be a problem with an image block and a paragraph block that you have put…
WordPress users like Gutenberg Gutenberg, the new ‘block’ editor, is a great development for WordPress.org. Editing content is more intuitive, especially for beginners. I have demo’ed Gutenberg for my local WordPress meetup (in Cambridge, UK). I’ve also taught Gutenberg as part of a 10 week beginners’ course on WordPress at a local college. In both…