mccormicky

Recently I applied online for a job. I don’t know why I did, I already have far too much work to do…But as a freelancer you do sort of long for steady work… feast or famine is very much part of a freelancer’s life. Ok so this job was right up my alley: working with WordPress. I can do that. What I couldn’t seem to do is fill out the application from correctly. I don’t know what I did wrong. I wasn’t informed of what I did wrong. I was told that because I didn’t fill out the form correctly that I was not a real professional.
That made me a little steamed but also profoundly grateful:what if I had gotten hired? I think it would have been hellish to work for this person as this colorful email exchange will no doubt illustrate.I’m aware you aren’t supposed to respond to rejection letters. But sometimes you just have to.
Warning: silliness follows below.

1st Email Received From Prospective Employer:

Thank you for responding to one of our positions.
Please read this entire job application [url removed to preserve what little dignity I have left]
When you are done, you can let us know by responding back to this e-mail.
Please don’t use the contact form or toll free number on our site, that is only for our customers.
Thank you for responding to one our hiring ads, & have a great day,
Michelle
[company name removed]

My Response:
Ok, I submitted the online form.
Hope to hear from you soon and have a great day!
-Sion McCormick

2cnd Email Received (No Longer Prospective Employer - Downgraded to Officious Person)

Hi Sion,
Thank you for applying to our position.
Unfortunately you didn’t follow all of the directions in the hiring ad, so we can’t consider you for our company.
We wish you all the best
Michelle

My Response:
I suppose you feel your reasons for being this strict are justified but you have lost the opportunity to work with a dedicated,highly skilled,loyal and extremely hardworking individual.

3rd Response (Michelle Big Boss Lady!)

Strict? LOL, no, this is called screening. We are a real company & we only hire real ICs.
And the fact that you feel you shouldn’t be screened tells us you aren’t really a professional, but we already knew that b/c if you had been, you would have actually read over the hiring ad & did as instructed like any A+ worker would have.
Also very insecure too since you had to try & show off to us that you are better then you are.
No need to respond back. This conversation is over.
Thank you
Michelle

My Response:
No, I am that good.
I never thought I shouldn’t be screened, how else are you going to find people who fit your profile? I just think your screening process is designed to provide you with the satisfaction of cutting someone off at the knees rather than actually finding someone skilled enough for the job.

4th Response From Michelle (She Who Must Be Obeyed)

Of course you would think that, that’s why you are NOT the boss & I am.
I’m going to ask you for the last time not to respond back.
All you are doing is arguing & blaming us for your mistakes instead of taking responsibility for your actions.
That is typical behavior of a low level worker.
bye

And my Final Response (Unless We Have A Fight To The Death for the Last Word!)
Oh Michelle, why so hostile?
Why are you insulting me? Because I dared to write back when you said the conversation was over?
Isn’t the conversation over when I say it is? Or are you such a big boss that you are the boss of people you haven’t even hired?
L-O-L to you.

Hi Everybody. For the last few days I have been working on a new theme for WordPress specifically a theme centered around using the WP ECommerce plugin. Right now there is only one other free Premium quality WP theme I know of that is centered around the shopping cart plugin .

I’m not competing with King Cart’s design, which is super cute especially that smiling apple in the little banner. Perhaps the trend of the mega banner has run its course? It makes sense to reduce the size of the banner:it frees up valuable real estate on the site above the fold. The navigation menu is positioned extremely well so that the hover dropdown lists don’t fall down over the page content- a tendency of crowded web sites and kind of why I don’t like to use them. The graphics are first class and my overall impression of the layout is one of clear, clean, well thought out presentation. In short, it is awesome. And free! I want to join in one the effort to create and release for free, well crafted WordPress themes meant to be used along with the WordPress E Commerce plugin.

The project has stalled somewhat because I was flooded with work. I’m not complaining. But I hope to get it packaged and set for free download very soon. The drawbacks of releasing a one size fits all WordPress theme are the inevitable support requests and how to field them all without draining my most valuable resource: my time. Also one wants to take care not to overly design the theme to make it simpler for people to customize it. It is very hard to create a simple theme! It is even harder to design for 2 sexes. I may just end up releasing 2 versions:one theme that is a bit more feminine and a masculine leaning theme. You know: blue is for boys and pink is for girls. Though I don’t think I will be that literal about the color choices.

So stay tuned, people. It’s coming soon.

And have it show only on the front page of the shop?

A client of mine asked if I could add an introductory/greeting kind of message to show to people looking at the front page of his online store. Sure thing, I said and I put it right in and went on my way thinking that was that. Later I realised that this blurb showed up everywhere on the shop. This is because the page with [productspage] in it is the same page for all the product pages. All full product lists and single product views get displayed with one little shortcode.

You also can’t put the paragraphs into the page template file for this page, or put it in a new file in the theme folder and include it in the page template because (again) that page runs the whole show. Back to square one. You could delve into the functions and make an “if on this page do this” statement (and for all you folks who can pull PHP out of their noses,congratulations) but I have always been more of a shove code around kind of person. So what I did was I found the line (line number 44) in the grid_display_functions.php file that displays the div that wraps the cart pages.

So after $output .= "<div class='productdisplay $category_nice_name'>\n\r";
I added $output .="<div class='blurbs'>my intro text</div>";

If you don’t have grid view you can still add an introductory blurb or welcome text or whatever to product_display_functions.php which is the file in charge of displaying the product list. Find line 333 (or find the first line in the file that writes the wrapper div for the shop pages) which is

$output .= "<div class='productdisplay default_product_display product_view_{$product['id']} {$category_nice_name}'>";
After line @ #333 add
$output .="<div class='blurbs'>my intro text</div>";

Avoiding error messages
Don’t use full quotes " " Normally you’d write <div class="code"> but you can’t because PHP is strict about that. Use single quotes instead and escape your HTML Characters to be on the safe side. An apostrophe is ˆ So write donˆt instead of don’t.

What About Upgrading?
Because you are adding to the file and not directly editing any code it will be easy to simply add it back in after the next upgrade. I keep a folder full of my changed plugin files so I can refer to them, grab the code and add it back, fast.

Google results: Results 1 - 10 of about 244,000,000 for welcome to my store.
Apart from the benefit of being able to introduce people to your products is it adds SEO to your shop page. Search engines love text with tasty keywords - so will you when you see your shop page climbing higher in the SERPs. Use well placed keywords in natural sentences that best describe your products or the overall message behind your products.So take care with the intro paragraph(s), don’t just say Welcome to my store that’s not only boring - it’s not going to help you in the SERPs. Most people are not searching for things to buy online or locally with the search terms welcome to my store.

shortcode = code in square brackets that can be inserted into a WordPress Page that includes a plugin in that page.
SEO = search engine optimization, sort of self explanatory.
SERPs = search engine result page(s).Also self explanatory.

In This Post: The Dashboard De-mystified. Posts or Pages? Categories &Category Relationships. Changing the Look of the Default Sidebar. The Plugins I Like.

Maybe you’ve already chosen WordPress or are seriously considering it. Maybe you’ve even already done the famous 5 minute WordPress installation. Maybe you’ve already chosen one of the free themes or enlisted some paid help getting one made just for you? Whatever the case, you should be very pleased with yourself to have gotten this far and I’ll bet you’re super jazzed to have your own website that uses your own domain name.

Trouble is, now what? How to make sense of the Dashboard? What does what? What do all these crazy terms mean? You’re scared to touch anything! Some settings are self explanatory but the only way to get comfortable is to jump in and start looking and reading. It’s like a new house with lots of rooms and who can stand not knowing what all the rooms look like? If you don’t think its a good idea to change a setting, don’t. But don’t be afraid to at least log in and look at the pages - because just looking does no harm.

Dashboard Settings

General - where your site title and description goes.
Writing -where you pick the default post category.
Reading - controls what the first page of your site shows which, by default, are your posts. You can make a page called Home and pick that to be the first page. Go to Pages >> Add New and create it there. But then you should also choose another page to show the blog posts. So make another page and choose that to be your posts page. You can be very creative with the title: Jeffery Zeldman titles his “The Daily Report” and I think that is pretty cool.Because there is so much one can do with Templates this section really deserves a complete post. But to keep things going I’ve kept it short.
Discussion controls your comments.
Media - choose image sizes
Privacy - choose whether or not search engines can index your site.
Permalinks - choose the way your linkage is set up.
Miscellaneous - pick where your images get uploaded- default is uploads. Also by default they are separated into year and month folders.
And just because I care here are some screenshots to illustrate each page.

Default Blues
All first time WordPress installations have one category, one page, one post and one comment. I can’t tell you how many About Me pages I’ve seen explaining what a Page in WordPress is and how many posts I’ve seen in Uncategorized, too for that matter. You’re expected to rename, edit or delete that stuff. You can’t delete the Uncategorized category (because WordPress needs at least one category) but you can rename Uncategorized to something more personalized like Random or General…The main point is the more you change stuff the more you make it your own. Don’t leave something as is if it is going to be visible on your site. Tip: In your User Profile page, you can type in the name you want to appear in the greeting in the dashboard or next to your posts and then click save. Then you can choose this name from the drop down list box and this will be the author name (and might appear next to your posts if your template allows this). Isn’t Posted by (your name) better than “Posted by admin”?

Sidebars
Default sidebars tend to show everything from a pages menu to a calendar, this is because there aren’t any widgets being used yet. Once you add widgets - only the content displayed by those widgets will show in your sidebars.

The Empty Website Blues
At this stage you don’t need to worry too much about how your sidebar will look and which widgets to use. You have bigger fish to fry! The biggest problem for nascent websites is the lack of content. The most important thing to focus on right now at this stage of your site is adding some.

Should You Use Pages or Posts?
WordPress as a CMS is more powerful when it is used as it was meant to be used which is the displaying of posts assigned to categories. Pages should be used for About Me, Contact and Photo Galleries or whatever- as long as that content is going to remain the same for an extended amount of time. If you really really don’t need Posts and even though that will leave your site pretty limited go ahead and use only Pages. Its your website! WordPress can make a new Page as easily as it can add a new Post,that’s why it is such a great CMS.

What Do Categories Do?
Categories organize your posts. Categories make it possible to keep post content separate from other post content.
Example: If you write about Celebrities you could make a child category of Celebrities called Angelina Jolie. Whenever you add a new post about ms.thing you would choose the Angelina Jolie category. Then you could have a list in your sidebar of your posts about Celebrities with a nested list of posts about Angelina Jolie. You could make as many of these “Celebrities” child categories as there are celebrities!
If your posts will only pictures of Celebrities then make a child category of Celebrities called photos with a grandchild category called Angelina Jolie. In my mind that is a very practical use of the grandchild category. More about that later on in this post.

Categories Run Everything!
Many people misunderstand categories. They either don’t use them at all or they make up a new category each time they write a new post.

The folks that add a new category for each new post could eventually have a totally bloated amount of categories, each with just one post assigned to it. This defeats the purpose and makes it just as hard to find interesting content as if there were no categories at all. Try instead to use a few Parent categories and then use as many Tags as you want.

On the other end of the spectrum are the people who don’t use or create any new categories,ever so all their posts go into Uncategorized.

Before you get started think about whether the desire for a certain kind of category widget is behind your motivation for creating categories. Ideally, the organization of content should not be determined by a stylistic preference but rather because it is a vital step towards helping people find what they are looking for.

The Parent, Child and Grandchild Category Relationship
If you want to set up parent, child and grandchild relationships for your categories, first you need to know what the main focus of your site is going to be. If the focus is going to be on Kitchen Supplies, here is one way to begin cataloging that vast area. Although I do think this kind of micro managing of categories better suits product pages, not post pages.

Parent Category: Cutlery

Child : Fork
Grandchild : Salad Forks
Child : Seafood Forks
Grandchild : Shrimp Forks
Grandchild : Crab Forks

Child : Spoon
Grandchild: Dessert Spoons
Grandchild : Soup Spoons

Child : Knife
Grandchild : Steak Knives
Grandchild : Butter Knives

I could be wrong but I have managed quite a few WordPress as a CMS type websites for over 3 years and not one of my clients (so far) ever really needed a grandchild category relationship.

There are plugins for practically everything. When choosing plugins, keep in mind you are inviting code into your WordPress site that might conflict with other plugins, might not use code that produces 100% valid XHTML, might make you fall in love with it only to be dropped by the plugin creator next month. And might just not work! But here are some I swear by.
All In One SEO (by default WP is pretty SEO challenged)
XML-Sitemaps (then you can submit a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools)
Flexi Pages (build your own sidebar page menu that shows only pages you want)
WP Database Backup (if disaster strikes- this is plugin is going to save your hide)
Tiny Contact Form (little contact form)
Cforms (build any kind of form you can think of)
WP-Ecommerce (online shop plugin, robust and highly supported with frequent upgrades and an active user forum, vital!)
NextGen (excellent photo gallery and album manager)

Nags:
If it is a business site keep the personal topic posts to a minimum, less than 5%. Set up a category called Personal so it will be obvious what that section is about.
Be careful with what you reveal, even sites meant to be 100% personal don’t need to get too personal.