Step 1- Post a blog (continued) – chose a theme and add some plugins

Whilst the default WordPress setup is fine, it is likely that you will want to make a few changes to the look and feel to personalise your blog. You will also want to install some plugins to help promote your blog, protect it and make it easier to use.

Appearance

Changing the look and feel of a WordPress site is a simple matter of browsing through the many themes on offer and selecting one. I recommend picking a few to install and try out in the Manage Themes tab. The reason being that not all themes work with every widget or plugin that you will wish to use. So, gather a few themes together, decide which widgets and plugins are essential for your needs and install them. Try out each theme in turn, watching out for missing functionality as well as how the appearance is affected. If you cannot find anything suitable in the available templates you will need a little bit of technical knowledge, but it should be fairly easy to modify an existing theme to make it look the way you want. Note that I haven’t modified the template I chose for this blog because I want to keep things as simple as possible for now, but I might come back to this at a later stage as it doesn’t support a couple of “nice to have” functions.

Install plugins – which WordPress plugins are best?

To me, this was the most difficult part of setting up WordPress. There are lots of plugins, many of which seem to do the same things, so it is not easy to work out what you need nor which tool to use to fulfil that need. So, I spent a while browsing user groups and review sites to come up with a shortlist of plugins that seem to be essential. These are not necessarily the best options for your own individual needs but they should at least point you in the right direction and shouldn’t let you down. Before looking at the individual plugins I chose, you need to be aware that most are updated frequently, as is WordPress itself, so you need to check for updates once a week or so. WordPress is very good at identifying and notifying when updates are available and most of the time you just need to click on a link to automatically update WordPress or the plugin.

Spam protection

The default in WordPress is to allow comments to be added by anyone, but they do not appear until you approve them. The catch is that you have to log in as an administrator to check your site periodically for new comments, but at least it is safer than leaving it to its own devices. There is probably a tool or setting to automate an email to let me know that a comment has arrived but I’ve given low priority to investigating that for now.

If you allow others to leave comments then you are inevitably going to be hit by spammers. Whilst some comments are obviously spam, others are more difficult to gauge as they tend to say how wonderful your blog is, so it is best to let a plugin help you identify potential spam rather than leave it to your own vanity.  Akismet, seems to be one of the more popular tools to protect your site from comment and trackback spam. There is a paid-for service but, so far, the free one has picked up around 15 spam messages in the few weeks that I’ve been writing the blog. Admittedly, that isn’t many but things would have been much worse without it. It seems also that the three main spam botnet groups were being merged during this period so spam was quiet over the holiday period anyway. You will need to register an Akismet account to use it but unlike some other services I haven’t had an untoward number of  follow-up mails from them, which is good.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

When you post a blog you want the search engines to find key words appropriate both for your blog and for your main web site. The All in One SEO Pack adds new fields to your posting in administration mode that let you add an SEO friendly title and set of keywords. The minus is that it doesn’t automatically pull these out from the text for you to pick from – instead you have to enter comma separated keywords just as you do with the metadata in a normal web site page.

Google Analytics for WordPress

Lets you keep track of how often each article has been read amongst other things. You need a Google account to set this up. I’ve installed this but haven’t implemented it properly in my Analytics account yet.

Google XML Sitemaps

Generates a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.

Sociable

Sociable automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favourite social bookmarking sites. A large number of social bookmarking sites are available with most of the usual suspects preselected. Note that it adds the links to your page so that others can update their bookmarks. Don’t expect it to automatically inform all your own accounts. If you have several social networking accounts that you want to update at a single stroke then you might want to try hellotxt.com which you can use outside of WordPress.

TweetMeme Retweet Button

Adds a button which easily lets you or others retweet your blog posts. Like the built-in RSS link it is separate from the links you can add in Sociable, thus increasing the likelihood of someone broadcasting your link. I use this one when I first post a new blog, so don’t dismiss it as a way to spam those old blogs yet again.

WordPress Database Backup

If you are not technically minded then this is the easiest way to back up your posts.

Other tools

There are a couple of other tools that you will find useful. One is a URL abbreviator to use when you tweet to announce that your latest blog has been published. The other is a tool to write your blog offline.

URL abbreviator

The first URL shortening service of note was tinyurl, whose popularity spawned over a hundred similar sites, making it difficult to chose the best one to use. When you come to chose a service there are several risk factors to bear in mind. First, few have a sustainable business model so may vanish suddenly. They may be closed down for breaking their internet service provider agreements by linking to pornography for example. Similarly, they may breach laws in the country they are based in.  One example is any service that provides links ending in “.ly” because that domain is under the jurisdiction of Libya.  Whilst the main ones such as bit.ly and ow.ly seem safe for now you should be aware that a few months ago the Libyans deleted a .ly domain because it was providing links to sites that were against Libyan Sharia Law.

One of the newest kids on the block is Goo.gl. Whilst it is unlikely that this service will disappear for lack of finance it is from Google, whose services tend to come and go on whims, so this doesn’t mean that it will stay either.

Offline editor

It is arguable whether there is an advantage in using an offline editor when the WordPress one is so good but one plus is that you can write your blog when not connected to the internet. Another advantage is that you have a backup if things go wrong.

Again, the problem is that there are dozens of the things to chose from. I use Live Writer mostly because it arrived one day in a Microsoft update, but it is obviously Windows centric and is not necessarily the best. So rather than write my own review, here is a link to a review of some others http://edwardkhoo.com/5-best-offline-wordpress-editor-for-your-blog/ .

In my experience so far, Live Writer is OK. It pulls down the template from your WordPress site so that, in theory, you edit something that looks like the final copy. It also provides much more space in the input box to view what you have written than is available in the WordPress editor.  However, it is not perfect. There are two things that annoy me. One is that the linked lists (bullet point and number lists) do not form properly. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong but, by trying to place myself in the position of a novice user, I have not gone out to seek a solution for this yet. The other annoyance is that the title text and hyperlinks are not coloured the same as they will appear in the final version but instead in a difficult to read, plain-ugly, lime green.

Remember that people work hard to provide and maintain these tools for you. You should donate if you find them useful.

Next time I will look over the web logs and rankings and let you know how things are coming along with promoting Interactive Developers eLearning services.

Being Scottish, the New Year is the most important the of various Spring, Harvest and Winter festivals to me. No, not because of the excessive consumption of alcohol, which unfortunately many Scots don’t even try to justify with the excuse of a holiday, but because the New Year signals a new start, new hopes and new opportunities.

Most businesses took a hit in 2010 so could do with a new start and fortunately life at Interactive Developers is looking less bleak for the start of the year than it could have done. Of course, there will be new troubles ahead, particularly for those involved with the Public Sector as the cuts take an increasing hold. For those of us in eLearning there will soon be a sad reminder at BETT 2011, where Becta will be absent for the first time in the 12 years that I have been attending.  I’ve spent several years of my life working on Becta related projects and made many friends on the way, so am sad to say farewell.

It is always difficult to predict what the future will bring, but with Apple allegedly ordering 65 million display screens for iPads, then this one should be a no brainer. With the tablet version of Android on its way and dozens of manufactures pushing into the market then it looks like this might be a platform for eLearning developers to get into this year. I would like to see tablets in schools but worry that close ties with the main UK school suppliers and Microsoft might result in the much delayed MS tablet (aka slate) being the predominant platform sold to schools. This would be a pity because, from what I’ve been able to glean, the Windows 7 based tablet interface is not up to the job of providing the simple yet elegant user interface that children need, unlike the alternatives. Microsoft are allegedly working on a new version of Windows 7 for tablets and writing this for processors more commonly associated with tablet hardware, but at the moment it is looking like too little too late. The joke going around the Web is that by the time MS releases a decent product everyone will already have an iPad or Android tablet, the market will have been lost and the new next big thing will be all the rage. The irony is that this year is the tenth anniversary of when MS first announced a tablet PC, with the second generation tablet announced almost a year ago, well ahead of the iPad

Speaking of Microsoft and decades, this year also marks the tenth anniversary of Windows XP and the notorious Internet Explorer 6. It will not take much effort for you to think of a couple of dozen technologies that are part of life today that didn’t exist, at least in a mainstream form, back in 2001.  So it is astonishing that these two are still around to cause us grief with their blue screens of death, browser incompatibilities and security headaches when better alternatives have been around for years. Here, I feel sorry for Microsoft because they have been caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place with corporates and other large institutions sticking vehemently to the old technology and the wonderful source of security risks it provides. The hope is that the upcoming Service Pack for Windows 7 will finally help initiate a migration, but who knows what will happen in these days of monetary difficulties.

And finally, speaking of browsers in general, it would be great to get some consensus in 2011 on an implementation of HTML 5 before things get too close to the old proprietary Internet Explorer/ Netscape mess that HTML 5 seemed to veer towards too many times in 2010.

Happy New Year!

Recently, I was asked to help a company bid for a tender that involved converting PowerPoint source materials into Accessible, SCORM-compliant eLearning materials. Now, I have to admit that I am not a big fan of PowerPoint. Nor am I convinced that a straight conversion would create worthwhile eLearning content, mostly because PowerPoint presentations tend to be brief, bulleted lists of key points that the presenter talks around to make sense of the points listed. So, to make a conversion worthwhile, the content would need supplementing with the detail and interactivity that would otherwise have been provided by the speaker.

As I’m always keen to research the options I looked at a few approaches that might provide a solution for the technical part of the requirement. The simplest of which is conversion to PDF. At its most basic the result would be a linear copy of the original, just like all the PDF files we’ve grown used to. Less well known, perhaps, is the ability of Acrobat to add page navigation and other interactivity as well as linking/embedding media files such as Flash movies and video. The result would be Accessible for the  most part and could provide rudimentary SCORM support, but it would take a lot of work to create several hours of materials to a quality level that we would be happy to release to learners. So, I was left with the feeling that this approach might be better for marketing than eLearning.

Next up is conversion to a Flash swf format. The two main contenders here are Adobe Captivate and Articulate. These take opposite approaches to create the final swf files. Captivate imports and converts  the PowerPoint file to a native format, whilst Articulate is an add-in for PowerPoint so development is done in the latter. Before I began my research I had anticipated that Captivate would provide the solution we needed. I’ve used it a few times over the years for rapid prototyping and for the creation of interactive help files and I know that it can produce accessible, SCORM compliant content with a decent level of interactivity,  I’ve had many a frustrating time with it, as it has been a slow running resource hog, unable to do all I might have wanted from it, such as keep audio files external. But the most frustrating thing – a tendency to crash and corrupt the source file at the drop of a hat – seems to have been mostly overcome by Macromedia/Adobe over the years. The advantages to me were in simplicity and flexibility. I thought we could easily create a generic template to provide the navigation and look and feel, import the PowerPoint files into the template then, having created a decent base to work from, add more text and interactivity as required. But I was wrong. When I tried to import a PowerPoint file it didn’t import the text as editable but as a background bitmap instead, which meant it wouldn’t be accessible to screen-readers. The imported PowerPoint text could be edited, but that involved the round tripping common to other Macromedia/Adobe products. Round tripping is great with most applications most of the time but having to trip to PowerPoint to change the text was a step too far into inappropriateness in this case. So, with the lack of directly editable and Accessible text import, the Captivate approach was dropped. I’d love to say that Articulate was better – after all it had the advantage of running without conversion to a third party application – but the swf files it created just couldn’t be read by JAWS or Narrator in Windows 7. This was really very disappointing. I find it shocking and difficult to understand why neither Captivate nor Articulate can create Accessible content from existing PowerPoint text in this day and age.

Next would have been conversion to HTML but I didn’t try this as I didn’t have access to any tools to do so. However, my feeling was that the pages created are likely to need quite a bit of work to mould into something that we could build into a good eLearning package and of course we still needed to add the missing details and interactivity somehow. Which brought me round to thinking that the best option would be to drop the idea of an automated conversion and to rebuild the materials from scratch.

The client wanted the ability to edit the materials and develop more themselves so the tools would need to be readily available, which brought Captivate back into the equation. However, like most projects, this one was very cost-sensitive. Doing the conversion by hand was going to add time and increased risk of errors and thus cost, so adding even more to the cost by imposing the need to purchase several licenses for Captivate was out of the question. Developing bespoke templates was also out, not only because of the cost but also because it was one of those projects that needed to be started yesterday. Which brought me to Xerte, an Open Source eLearning toolset developed by the University of Nottingham. There are two main versions – one running on a PC and the other online. Both are based on the Flex SDK so anyone with a bit of Flex or ActionScript 3 knowledge can make changes if needed. Most of the usual eLearning templates are available as well as a few additional ones such as links to Google Maps. The most important point of Xerte, at least the online toolkit version, is that it was designed to be used by non-technically skilled content creators, which is ideal for clients who wish to maintain and extend the eLearning materials, Using the online version would mean that updates will be easier to maintain. Both versions provide excellent Accessibility support including variable text size and colour/contrast schemes as well as screen reader and magnifier support. As part of this support the buttons are drawn using the SDK rather than being bitmaps, but this could be changed in code should it be a problem.  As an added bonus Xerte can be configured to directly upload the materials to a VLE such as Moodle without having to go through the steps of downloading, content packaging and then uploading to the VLE, which not only saves time and reduces error but also makes things much simpler for non-technical users. Like the equivalent commercial rapid development tools it suffers from a lack of flexibility in the layout and combination of templates that a bespoke solution would provide to add polish and sophistication. Nonetheless, it is an excellent product that makes it difficult to justify the cost of purchasing a commercial equivalent and is undoubtedly the best solution for this particular project.

This is an experiment to see if it is possible to take advantage of the increasing use of the web by companies to research the online profiles of individual job applicants and potential business partners.

So far, the discussion has been about how things stand at the moment in terms of our web presence, In that respect Interactive Developers probably do more than most small companies to maintain a web presence – but almost certainly not enough to make us stand out from the crowd. The plan, therefore, is to improve our chances of getting found and noticed as cheaply as possible with minimal requirements for technical expertise, so that anyone can do the same.

Step 1- Post a blog

I have to admit that I was initially surprised by this one, because I had been swept along by the mistaken belief that blogging has had its day and lost out to Tweets, Walls and suchlike. But that assumption was far from correct, especially in terms of business and personal promotion, which is the focus of this experiment. In fact, blogging was at the top of all the advice I came across in my research for this project. The reasons for its importance are simple:

• it creates a focus to base the rest of the project on.
• it increases the number of linkable items connected to you every time you publish a new article.
• it enables you to demonstrate your expertise and enthusiasm for your work, which is attractive to employers and reassuring for potential business partners.
• it helps add a human touch to the company web site, or curriculum vitae if you are job hunting.

Setting it up

Setting up a blog is not difficult, especially if you stick with the standard, WordPress, application, There are lots of other blogging tools but WordPress is almost perfect and is so dominant that even Microsoft recently abandoned its own service, encouraging its users to migrate to WordPress.

You can use the free WordPress account or pay for one of the many  WordPress hosting sites. But it is better if you can run it on your own website, like we have done, because you want to attract as many visitors to your site as possible rather than split them away.  If you have no choice but to use a site other than your own, then make sure to include lots of hyperlinks between each site so that the association is maintained – but don’t overdo it otherwise the search engines will detect the overuse and drop your ranking accordingly.

Setting WordPress up is not difficult: there is plenty of documentation on their site and elsewhere, and it should only take 5-10 minutes using the setup tools provided. Setup is even easier if your website host provides tools, such as Fantastico, to automate the task. If you decide to use your own domain you will need a spare MySQL database to store the data from your blogs, but finding that out from your web host provider or cPanel is about the limit of the technical skills needed. The chances are that you will spend quite a bit longer than a few minutes setting things up though, as there are a number of ways to tailor WordPress to your needs, which I will go over next time.

Creating content

The blogging itself is perhaps the difficult part to get stared with, but don’t be put off my a lack of confidence or because you think you have nothing to say. The point is to show that you are knowledgeable and enthusiastic about your work, company, customers, or whatever you chose to blog about. It could be about the skills you use from day to day, problems, specialist knowledge, tricks and tips or your opinions.  So, even if you think you have the lowliest job or sell the most common thing in the world, it will be interesting to your target audience. If it helps, I am anything but the garrulous, centre of attention seeking, non-stop party going type, yet I have managed to at least make a start .

The aim is to spend only about 15 min each day on it, though admittedly I have spent longer than that on these first few blog pages, mostly because I didn’t want to break up what I wanted to say any more than I’ve done already and I’ve devoted some time to research on the project also. Reports vary on when you will see the benefits – from 10 consecutive days to 45 days – but, by all accounts, most people or companies will benefit from the effort. I’m not sure how things go beyond that time, but by then you will have built up a reasonable portfolio which should hold you in good stead. So, perhaps the approach is to have an initial flurry to improve your ranking, then supplement the content biweekly, weekly, monthly or whenever it takes to maintain your ranking in balance with your time and enthusiasm.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be a written blog. It could take the form of a podcast or webcast – both of which can be run from WordPress too. Both have merits especially as visitors get to see you or hear your voice, which should help form a bond. The downsides are that,compared to text, they may take a little longer to produce – especially if you are nervous or a perfectionist-  and are more difficult to index and thus search everything you say, though I expect Google is transcribing every drm-free podcast and video on the web as I write. I’ve seen some blogs with both video and the script transcribed in the main body of the blog, so perhaps I will give that a try at some point.

Next time, I will cover tailoring WordPress with the help of add-ins, configurations and tools.

Previously, I pointed out that the way companies and employers vet new candidates for contracts or job vacancies has been changing. I also mentioned that I am going to try to utilise this knowledge to hopefully increase Interactive Developers client numbers and projects, whilst describing the process as I go along.

Before I begin, though, I decided it would be wise to take a snapshot of where things stand currently. For the snapshot, I’ve noted details of the client list, average hits on the website and a few other statistics, so that I have a baseline to check back on. I also installed the free (after registration) Firefox add-in rank checker from seotools.com to record my site rankings etc. I’ll not share those details, as they are obviously company confidential but I will let you know of any significant outcomes as we move on.

There are three parts to the process of improving the success rate – getting found, getting noticed and following through. For the short-term I will concentrate on getting found and noticed in these blog pages as those are probably  enough to be getting along with.

Getting found

Over the years we’ve managed to stay fairly high on the search engine rankings, though this has involved periodic revisits to redress issues as the search engine criteria matured. When we first set up Interactive Developers it was enough just to have a website, though adding description and keyword metadata quickly became essential. Nowadays ranking involves a more complex relationship between the metadata and keyword counts in the page, external links and paid-for advertising, which is why search engine optimisation (SEO) of pages is important. Here at Interactive Developers we have done our best to maximise SEO with minimal cost. We have avoided going down the Google ad route, so far,  because we don’t believe it is the best approach for our market. However, we do make use of other Google tools because external links to http://interdevs.com increase ranking. Linking from as many Google things as possible seems to help – though I found Google surprisingly uncoordinated when we tried this out with maps and analytics etc. As well as using Google’s own tools we also use those from seotools.com, mentioned above, and also from aboutus.org.

I’m planning to expand on getting found in later articles, but for now I wanted to make it clear that we are starting with a fairly well SEO-optimised site, with a few external links and a decent site ranking for several keywords.

Getting noticed

There is no point in getting found if you are subsequently passed by. This is true both for company websites and individual job hunters. At Interactive Developers we’ve kept things fairly simple and straightforward on the main website– mostly covering the facts of the programming and e-learning development services we provide. Much of this is in the realm of conventional marketing and the basics of good website design, which is outside the scope of this project. Instead, I will be looking at what can be done beyond the main website – either  whilst remaining (ironically) within the same domain or by utilising some of the many external resources that are out there.

OK, so that’s where we are at the moment. We have a website that does the job but, really, we should be doing  more to grab attention and get noticed, which is the next step.

Until next time …

Things seem to be shifting yet again in the world of finding work. By “finding work” I mean two similar things – individuals seeking employment and businesses seeking new contracts or customers. Contributors to this shift include the economic malaise, an increasing dependence on the internet,  the growth of social media and the move to – and importantly, the acceptance of – working at home either for an employer or to run your own small business.

What brought my attention to the change was a recent rise in the number of people or organizations claiming that they could improve anyone’s chances of getting a job – if you pay them for the information, of course. Well, as it happens, it is not too difficult to work out what they are selling and to deduce that what works for job applications could also work for small companies seeking new business.

Most tactics boil down to the use, or perhaps exploitation of social media. For example, in the traditional approach of filling job vacancies, most employers and recruitment agencies are overwhelmed by the large numbers of near-identically formatted curriculum vitae that they sort (by fair means or, more likely, foul) into a short-list of candidates. In terms of a technical specification, the result should be a perfect match. But, of course, we all know that there is no guarantee that this is so, or that the candidate will fit in either socially, or share the work ethics and philosophy of the business. Which is why many potential employers and agencies supplement an application by checking short-listed candidate’s Facebook, LinkedIn or other social media accounts. Just how legal this is under current UK employment laws is open to question, but it is becoming common practice nonetheless. I expect that as employers become more comfortable with using social media like this then the need for CVs will decline and hopefully disappear for ever, because the latter is a terrible, heavily flawed process that too often eliminates the best candidates for the wrong reasons .

Less well publicised, but most certainly happening, is a similar situation that arises when companies look to take on new business partners or contractors. They can find out a fair amount from the official web site, but after stripping out the sales and marketing hype they are down to asking the same type of questions as they would about a CV. That is, “can we work with these folk?”, “are they competent and reliable?” , “will they meet the deadlines?” and so forth.

Which brings me back to the point raised at the start. Because the processes used to offer work are changing, then the implication is that the processes used to find work, either as a job or business contract, must change to match. Assuming that not everyone is aware of this, it should be possible to take advantage of the knowledge, at least in the short term, to either gain more clients to get a new job.

The aim of this blog – well, the business rather than the e-learning part- is to track my attempts to exploit this knowledge as an advantage in gaining clients. Think of it as an experiment, though, rather than policy!
I will describe and implement some of the potential approaches, report back on how easy each is to implement and provide some feel for whether or not they have a noticeable effect on bringing in eLearning sales and interest for Interactive Developers. I’m not going to deal specifically with looking for jobs – though my colleagues and I do work freelance as well as taking on full projects – but many of the principles are the same and I will try to point these out as we go. Hopefully, the experiment will be fruitful for us, as well as being helpful and of interest to others. In particular I hope to help individuals seeking work in these troubled times, as well as small businesses, like ours, that have an excellent record of ability but rely traditionally more on word of mouth than on an expensive, dedicated sales team to bring in more work.

Until next time …