Kinetic Knowledge - Business Blogging Services » WORDPRESS

Abandoned WordPress Plugins

Chris Frerecks — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:50:57 +0000

I’ve seen a lot written lately by folks who have favorite WordPress plugins. We certainly have lots of them ourselves, but it concerned me some for people managing, or counting on others to manage, their WordPress business blogs. That concern was confirmed some this weekend at WordCamp Orlando when Jane Wells talked a little about abandoned WordPress plugins and when a programmer in the audience shared concern for the service responsibilities involved. So, I wanted to throw some caution out there: namely, there are lots of WordPress plugins… and some get abandoned!

For instance, did you know that the most popular WordPress plugin of all ‘All In One SEO Pack’ *was abandoned* by it’s creator in mid-June? Management has since been picked up by able programmers, but as a business [or even as someone speaking to business people] it’s important to understand what WordPress open source software is.

WordPress is managed by a core development team and it’s supported by an international ‘open source community’ of independent programmers & designers. The core development team manages software updates, while the ‘open source community’ mostly builds template themes [designs] and plugin features. In theory, it’s their responsibility to keep up to date with WordPress updates… and they don’t always do it. This is understandable as no one can work for free indefinitely and the definition of free does not include accountable. What it means is, unmanaged or abandoned plugins can undermine your blog so manage updates for it and all the plugins you’ve added carefully.

If you’re a business, your blog is ultimately a core asset that accumulates subscribers, feed connections, bookmarks, links, brand recognition and competitive search engine indexing. That’s all potential new business pipeline so you’ve really got to be careful.

Kinetic Knowledge is a WordPress Management Service that, amongst many other things, offers ongoing technology management & advancement.

Managing Your WordPress Blog Like It’s A Business Asset?

Chris Frerecks — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 06:00:52 +0000

On a daily basis we’re contacted by various small to medium sized business people asking what it entails to manage a WordPress blog for their business. It makes sense they’d ask because, to a large degree, good business blogs add marketing strength where most websites can’t. Some are playing around with free blog solutions. Others work with website companies that throw in free blog services. Most are wondering whether or not a business blog service makes sense. What we have learned over the years is that it is consuming and, at times, difficult [grunt] work.

Regardless, in order to be successful you’ve really got to recognize your business blog platform, it’s accumulated subscribers, feed connections, links and search indexing as a serious business asset. An asset that can bring leads and new business at any time. FREE has no interest in these things, yet sooner or later all assets require time, resources and/ or money. Busy people may also need convenient educational blog resources and service, but let’s look at what the challenges might be when managing WordPress for business.

Customization & Design – Do you want a brand or will you settle for something anyone else can have? If a brand, you’re going to need to do some custom design work.
Hosting – Hosting is not simple! You either pay for it or you get a minimal service. Be sure you understand the customer service obligation, memory, storage, data backup timing and security or you are definitely asking for surprises.
Security – Servers get attacked. Sites get hacked. Your asset needs security.
WordPress Updates – Wordpress updates its software quite regularly and this process must be managed on your platform. If you have custom design, plugin features and any unique code modifications, which is very normal for serious business bloggers, than updates have to be managed carefully. Keeping everything in sync, including adequate load times, can get tricky.
Plugin Updates – Like Wordpress updates, plugin features must be updated. If there are code modifications, they have to be managed very carefully when updating. Again, keeping everything in sync, including adequate load times, can get really tricky.
Plugin Code Modifications – If you’ve created modified or customized plugins, you’ve got to be sure these are not going to undermine your WP upgrade. Shoddy code modification can easily topple everything.
Load Times – Load times appeal to both search spiders and humans. If load times get too slow, SEO suffers and humans get impatient defeating the whole purpose of being there! Any combination of plugins, single plugin or code modification can undermine load times, so management is key.
Page URLs – New page or post URLs should to be set to support SEO, unless you have other specific requirements. In either event, every new pages URL matters, so set them properly.
Avoiding Duplicate Pages – If not set up properly, your [home page] post, that post in its category and in its archive may look to search engine spiders like duplication. Duplication won’t necessarily kill you, but it can lessen the effectiveness of a search engine crawls. Do that, and you may just reduce crucial key word and phrase indexing.
Return on Investment – Do you understand what’s actually happening as a result of your business blogging? Are you generating traffic? Are visitors engaging with your business brand or just bouncing? Are you capturing leads? Adding good traffic analytics is an important step. Understanding what they mean and how to use them becomes crucial to getting a return.
Lead Capture – It’s one thing to get visitors there, but what are you doing to capture them? Giving anything away? And if so, what information are you gathering in exchange for that give?
Training & Support – How much time do you have to understand all of the above? Are you keeping up with new feature possibilities or modifying those you do have? If something isn’t right, where do you go for help?
And lot’s more we’ll add as we go…

At $49 per month Kinetic Knowledge business blogging services make sense because you tend to the above, while adding convenient educational resources and highly accountable human service.

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Kinetic Knowledge is a WordPress Management Service offering build, design, search optimization, ongoing technology management & advancement, hosting, storage, security, blog marketing education, blog content options and more.

WordPress can be free, but ONLY if you’re OK with Advertising

Chris Frerecks — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:23:02 +0000

We’re often asked how there can be a free version of WordPress without the support of advertising. The fact is, if WordPress is hosting your blog for free it has actually added advertising to cover that cost. And by the way, this shouldn’t be a surprise or a disappointment. Valuable software like WordPress shouldn’t be free. Particularly not if you have actual business requirements and certainly not when the folks at WordPress work so hard to make ‘publishing to the web’ so accessible for so many.

To clarify and according to WordPress itself, “To support the service we may occasionally show Google text ads on your blog…” Matt Mullenweg, Founding Developer, adds that the advertising has enabled his team to offer an ever- improving software without charging for upgrades; however, he also adds there are enterprises that would never want the advertising. This is important particularly because WordPress cannot filter competitive advertising and that is because the ad- software is contextual. [Contextual meaning, the ad system scans the blog for keywords and returns ads based upon the keyword text it finds.] So, for example, if your free blog is based upon Real Estate or Architecture or Travel, etc. it’s likely you’re pulling competitive advertising on to your blog.

Now, this doesn’t leave one without a choice. For the business that wishes to manage WordPress on its’ own, they now offer an advertising opt- out for a monthly cost of about $30. Obviously you have choices with WordPress and we’re certainly here to offer comprehensive & affordable management services, including branded design, feature plugin, software update management and extensive ongoing education. If it interests, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

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Understanding WordPress

Chris Frerecks — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:48:50 +0000

Business Blogs Defined

Blogs are websites; however, they differ in that they allow the layperson to publish *at will.* This is a really big deal for your business because search engines are attracted to active sites. They seek to continually identify, consume and organize [or index] the most timely content. Equally the big deal, blogs have eliminated the barriers to becoming a consistent source of advertorial trade media!

WordPress Business Blog Options

This post takes a general look at WordPress blog software and those that support it. To begin it’s best to know your options, which include:

1) Create a free blog, which would be hosted as a sub domain of WordPress [i.e. http:janedoe.wordpress.com].

2) Download WordPress onto a domain you own using paid host support.

3) Hire an independent programmer/ designer [at an hourly rate] to set WordPress up for you.

4) Outsource to a comprehensive Business Blogging Service offering the management of WordPress on an ongoing basis for a fixed price.

What follows will offer some context for how WordPress and its’ supporting Open Source Community work together.

Officially there are two versions of WordPress software [WP and WPMU], but there are also a variety of open source variants and forks out there. WordPress is managed by a core development team and it is supported by an international ‘open source community’ of independent programmers & designers. The core development team manages software updates, while the ‘open source community’ mostly builds template themes [designs] and plugin features.

Open Source Software Defined

Open Source software could be lightly summarized as using the power of many to develop, evolve and improve existing software. More specifically, software source code is made available by someone [possibly, via a copyright license] permitting collaborative use, change, improvement and modified redistribution. Many believe it’s the future of software development because of how [assuming the programming environment is active] it can enable rapid fixes, improvements and fine tuning. By no means should you throw your proprietary software in the trash- there are potential pitfalls here! For instance, the more people contributing to software code the sloppier it can become. Like anything, without good management things go wrong and you should know that no one pays the ‘open source community’ to participate. Hang tight and we’ll look at why they participate soon, but studies have shown versus proprietary software that open-source software has a higher, quicker flaw discovery turn around. And let’s face it, even Microsoft and Google have had their issues.

So, from the core development team you have WordPress software code. You also have periodic updates for that software code. From the ‘open source community’ you have template themes [designs] , feature plugins and also the random hack to meet a specific need or goal. The core team allows certain of the ‘open source community’ to see what is coming down the pike [update- wise]. The community is encouraged to offer input and to update their various template themes and plugin features; however, software updates are ultimately in the hands of the core WordPress development team. And by the way, WordPress software is the core team’s day job. They are – very important - paid!!; whereas, the ‘open source community’ may not be. Open Source are talented independent programmers & designers who build template themes and plugin features, partly for the love of WordPress and partly because their work may serve as recognition [if widely accepted] for unique programming and/ or design skill. Other words, it’s advertising and they do it to get work so they can get hired and paid.

Business Blogging Requirements

As a business, it’s important to understand this all: there is no formal [open source] template or feature plugin evaluation process. While it is NOT the rule and most certainly the exception, there can be sloppy, insecure or obsolete code coming out of the ‘open source community.’ To demonstrate, consider this recent business scenario: “I’m not familiar with what the protocol is for these matters but…many WP users have installed themes by XYZ. She has stopped updating her themes and her former website is down. I have tried contacting her w/o success. I was wondering whether protocol permits a theme developer adopting her themes and updating them (making them widget-ready for example) for the thousands of WP users who have wonderful themes like A, B & C. Many of us hope these themes won’t be abandoned.” The fact is, some programmers/ designers are just learning about WordPress or worse they may not keep up with core software updates. With core code, frequent updates, themes, plugins and the random hack there is a lot to keep up with. While the many themes & plugins seem novel and fun, depending on how you actually manage it all will determine how successful you can be. Let’s face it, it can be a miserably frustrating, if not damaging, experience when something breaks, doesn’t jibe or comes down… and it happens! Business people are often too busy to keep up with the development of software, not to mention an entire supporting community.

In the long run it can pay to have experienced WordPress Business Blogging help to outsource the management of WordPress for a fixed price. Based upon our experience with various Blog solutions, we’re convinced [if you have the right people managing it] WordPress is simply the most user and search engine friendly software out there. And by the way, serious companies like CNN and Dow Jones deploy WordPress… and they get good help.

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