Macmillan Global Wins TEFL.net Site of the Month Award
Posted by Aaron Keenan on February, 5th 2010We’re very pleased to hear of the success of http://www.macmillanglobal.com in the TEFL.net Site of the Month Award. Global won the award for February due to their valuable teaching resources and all-round contribution to English language training.
The site has achieved great success already in terms of visits and newsletter subscribers. We’re confident that this success will continue due to their commitment to high quality content. The site offers audio and pdf downloads, videos and frequent blog posts about their course and broader issues relating to teaching and learning English as a foreign language. The blog section features the writing of well-respected contributors such as David Crystal and Linsay Clandfield.
We are proud of the web design and our contribution to presenting their content in an effective, visually-appealing manner and we hope to see the site continue to achieve Macmillan’s goals in award-winning style.
Embedding YouTube Videos, Flickr Images and more in WordPress 2.9
Posted by Aaron Keenan on January, 27th 2010WordPress 2.9 has greatly increased the ease of embedding videos, images and other types of content. You are now able to display videos on your site from, for example, YouTube simply by entering the url of the YouTube video as plain text in a WordPress page or post. It is also possible to similarly embed videos from Vimeo, DailyMotion, Google Video and other video sites or embed images from Flickr and Photobucket. Embedding articles from Scribd or polls from PollDaddy is equally staightforward. A more comprehensive list of sites that you can embed from using this method is available at http://codex.wordpress.org/Embeds .
The example displayed below shows the post content in the admin (4 urls entered as plain text on a separate line – one from Flickr, one from Scribd, one from YouTube and one from PollDaddy) and the next two screenshots display the output on the front end of [...]
Image Editing in WordPress
Posted by Aaron Keenan on January, 18th 2010The release of version 2.9 provided WordPress users with some very useful additional image editing capabilities. In the following article we will look at some of the new options for reversing, rotating, cropping and resizing images.
When you are editing a page or post, a row of tools for uploading additional files is available just above the main content entry box. These tools are labelled ‘Upload/Insert’ and the first is used to handle image files. Click on this tool to open the media file pop up window.
From the pop up window, click on ‘Select Files’ and choose the image you want to upload.
Once this file has uploaded select the ‘Edit Image’ button.
To crop the image, click, hold [...]
WordPress Database Backup Plugin
Posted by Aaron Keenan on January, 7th 2010Today we are very thankful for one highly recommend and potentially invaluable plugin: the WordPress Database Backup plugin.
It’s likely that you have been frustrated several times by losing unsaved work when your computer or one of it’s applications has crashed unexpectedly. Just imagine, then, the all-consuming sorrow of losing weeks, months or even years of blog posts or other site content. Your hosting company may provide a responsible backup service (or you may have a well-considered system in place if your site is self-hosted) but some extra insurance can be crucial if the unexpected happens (as it did for one of our client sites today).
The WordPress Database Backup plugin makes backing up WordPress content a painless process. Once the plugin has been added and activated through the WordPress admin section, it is then possible to specify an email address for the database backups to be sent to. [...]
Benefits of Using a Content Management System (CMS)
Posted by Aaron Keenan on January, 6th 2010A content management system can be used to:
Simplify the addition and management of content on your site (so that this will all be possible without technical knowledge).
Allow many people to edit and contribute to your site and allow control over which contributors have particular permissions.
Set a template or theme for the site so that new content can be easily set to display with a consistent style.
Incorporate security features, SEO features and other functionality and keep up to date with upgrades.
Provide options to backup and export site content.
Around 5% of sites currently online use some form of web CMS technology – this means that roughly 95% of current websites can only be edited with specialist technical knowledge. This is unfortunate for the vast majority of people who are unlikely to have the familiarity with HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript or other languages that would be needed to [...]
WordPress – The Leading Open Source Content Management Application
Posted by Aaron Keenan on January, 5th 2010WordPress consistently triumphs in popularity polls and is in use on over 200 million websites. What most impresses me about WordPress is it’s flexibility: it’s excellent for the most straighforward site or blog but can also be extended to include ecommerce, forums, social media functionality and much more. In addition, this flexibility is aided by an enthusiastic community that provide many of the plugins to extend the WordPress core free of charge. The result is that WordPress represents an excellent, cost-effective option for a wide range of sites.
I will be posting regularly on this blog about what WordPress has to offer as a Content Management System and ways to take advantage of this functionality. Subjects that will be covered include:
What a Content Management System (CMS) is and how it could benefit your site
How WordPress compares with other content management solutions
Recommended WordPress plugins
New features in WordPress [...]