Petersen Media Group

We help you spend less time ensuring your site is there, and more time making it profitable.

WordCamp Austin 2013 – SEO Still Matters

WCATX-badgeI’ll be co-presenting SEO Still Matters with Robert Neu of FAT Media on May 18th at WordCamp Austin in Austin, TX. We will be hitting the key points on what to plan on for your next post regarding the SEO fields, keywords, and also planning your site around a content marketing mindset that works with SEO rather than being single-minded in crazed SEO efforts that cost a fortune.

SEO is a natural effort by which traffic is a by-product. If it’s not a natural part of your next post’s planning or something you can easily visit doing a page audit on your site, then it’s too complex and you’re overshooting your optimum effort-to-reward target.

If you have any questions or topics you’d like addressed after the slides are posted, along with my speaking notes, then post them in the comments and we’ll start a discussion.

Here is a link to the presentation below: SEO Still Matters

Process Refining Through Lessons Learned

Lifting lesson learnedRefine your process when things work (and especially when they don’t work) to improve your position in the market. One of the reason fledgling business fail is because they can’t quickly enough learn from their mistakes or their initial mistakes are too much to overcome because they didn’t take baby steps. While I’ve managed to avoid devastating mistakes so far, I’ve had my fair share of lessons learned over the past 4+ years. I presented a lot of them at WordSesh, but here is a nice, tidy list.

The 10 Commandments of business

  1. Respond to initial inquiries quickly. The number of projects I’ve landed because I was the first (and sometimes only) person to respond is too great to guess at this point. Hundreds. Some people don’t even reply to perfectly good requests.
  2. Don’t give away the goose. When you’re doing an initial quote, proposal, or call, don’t tell them everything you’re going to do – they just might find someone in India to do your plan for $300 – at least charge for your time if you’re going to give that much info away.
  3. Charge how much you need to make ends meet. A sure-fire way to fail in business to to charge such low rates that you can’t pay your bills. If you need help with pricing, I’m available for coaching on this, along with many other areas of running your business.
  4. Under-promise and over-deliver. Few things will cause you more work dealing with frustrated clients than over-promising and under-delivering. Sure, timelines can slip, but be open and proactive when they do.
  5. Don’t make it too easy for people to grab your attention through your site. I’ve recently seen a few of my fellow Genesis developer friends tweet that they were taking their phone numbers off their websites. I was shocked that they were published in the first place, but most people are more extroverted than I am. It comes down to adding layers of contact processes for vetting potential clients. See my Contact page.
  6. Do what you say you’ll do. When you say you’ll do something, do it. If things start to unravel, reach out to those affected by an issue.
  7. Do no harm. This is a big one for me. I get a boatload of bad ideas and preconceived notions coming at my via contact form for what people want on their website that should never, ever happen. As a quality dev, it is your job to educate people and help save them from a bad choice. I at least make them insist twice and then inform them that their work will not appear in my portfolio.
  8. KISS. “Keep it simple stupid” is a phrase from WWII and are words to live by when it comes to site organization and design. Visitors don’t want to think, so don’t confuse them with a crazy homepage.
  9. Clear communication. I’ve never used contracts before. Before this week, that is. It’s more of a “what to expect” and “here’s how we’re going to handle payment” agreement, but it really clears the air for what is to come and who is responsible for what.
  10. Ask for referrals. When you finish a project, ask for a referral from your extremely happy client. Chances are, they know someone who could use a good website and you’re just the person to do it.

There’s a lot more to write on the subject, but I hope you find these to guide you to the next level of doing business with great success.

How to Modify a Genesis Framework Child Theme

The vast majority of the questions on the StudioPress forums for Genesis framework child themes are related to the general WordPress community who has been introduced to user-friendly premium themes not being web developers or programmers. The average website owner has no idea how to look for what to change or what options there are in changing something.

That is why people like me have a nearly-endless market of professionals of other industries needing my industry’s skills to make their vision happen.

A lifetime of learning

While it takes thousands of hours to learn a craft to the point of being both proficient and efficient, there are some simple things that the average person can handle once they are shown the tools to use and some instructions on how to use them. For those people, this should help them along the way with simple tasks.

A recap of the tools

In case you didn’t click the link in the previous paragraph, here is what you absolutely need:

Inspect Element context menuFirst, either Chrome or Firefox web browsers. In them is a feature when you right-click an element on the screen that says “Inspect Element” in the right-click context menu (yours will likely look different based on OS and browser plugins that alter the context menu).

This will bring up a frame inside the browser window that shows you both the generated HTML of the page and the CSS code all the way down the system of CSS files that each element uses to generate how it looks and behaves (upon hover, click, etc.).

Inspect Element window

Second, you need a text editor. Any editor (even TextEdit or Notepad) will do, but there are syntax highlighting editors that color different syntax in the language you’re typing in (usually just CSS, PHP, HTML, and JS). Those would be Sublime Text, skEdit, TextMate, or Notepad++.

Third, you need to stop using your hosting cPanel, Plesk, or other control panel to go to the file manager or FTP add-on screen in the browser. People who edit files on the server should use an FTP client. I’m a Mac guy, so I use Transmit 4 (one of the best $30 I spent on my Mac software library) and there are a few good options for Windows. This will let you navigate to the theme folder on your host and directly open a file so when you save it, it loads the update to the server and you can refresh the browser – more importantly, it lets you undo a mistake and go back many steps in history to recover a from a string of mistakes.

What are some basics?

The questions that are most easily addressed in a general post like this are CSS issues. These are typically questions about the appearance, spacing, alignment, or other visual cues. Sometimes something can be handled with either CSS or PHP, such as having something not appear on certain pages, like single posts. Let’s look at the CSS items first.

CSS

It’s a rather simple syntax to get the hang of the majority of layout and appearance items necessary to wireframe a site or change up the text appearance on a site pretty significantly. With the exception of adding Google Webfonts to a child theme via the functions.php file, 98% of font edits will be done in CSS. Here are some common attributes and links to their use:

text-align
text-transform
font-decoration
color
font-family
font-size
font-weight
min-height
margin
padding
background
border
list-style-type
box-shadow
text-shadow
opacity
width
height
float
postion
display
overflow
clear
max-width

PHP

PHP is more of a programming language than CSS, which is just syntax that can do some neat stuff. With PHP, you can add information to the database, connect to remote services, jump in and out of HTML syntax, and construct new plugins and themes. It is the backbone of WordPress. Here is what PHP looks like for one of the child theme’s functions.php file:

PHP code

There are two main places to look for how to change something that doesn’t look like it’s a CSS edit: functions.php and the page template being used (home.php, page_landing.php, etc.). Once in there, the themes are documented well enough that you should be able to find what you’re looking for and try to alter or remove code.

This is how the majority of us learned PHP – by breaking hundreds of things and learning from those mistakes. You WILL break things and you WILL get frustrated. It’s best to learn on a development install rather than your live site, but working with real-world situations makes you very strong in what you learn.