Website

Well, I recently cut over our new rendition of the JaveLLin Solutions, LLC website.  Overall, things went ok, but I certainly learned some lessons for next time.  One of our biggest changes was moving over to a theme called Optimize Press.  Our site is built on WordPress, so that makes things pretty easy.  The theme is hyped up as being completely customizable, great for landing pages, blah blah blah.  Well, this is true is true in certain areas, but certainly has a some areas to be improved.

When I bought this theme, I certainly thought it looked cool, easy to use and would give me exactly what I needed to start building a better site.  One of the biggest things I quickly discovered is the inability to really create a good header.  A couple of different issues on this point.

1. you can add a logo, but you can’t add anything next to it, not even a text version of the company name.2. No easy way to add phone numbers, RSS links, social media connections, etc.
3.  Creating a template once and applying it to all the pages that already exist, not happening.

The designer itself is really nice and easy to use.  It comes with lots of templates to get you started, and it’s all drag and drop.  This is especially helpful, since I’m trying to push the website over to my partner for the majority of stuff.  Of course, I’m sure I’ll be tweaking content forever, but as I learn more marketing, I come up with better ways to say things =)  However, without creating a brand new page, it’s very difficult to take existing content and just drop it into the new theme.  I resorted to copy and paste for each existing page.  Not the end of the world, but certainly tedious.

I’ll talk more about the cutover next time.  That came with it’s own challenges.  Anyway, thanks for reading,

Well, this one has been plaguing for a while now, and now that we are making a transition to Optimize Press in order to redo our website, I had to figure this one out, since Optimize Press has limitation in Internet Explorer.  So I was able to find some cludgy work arounds, but today I think I finally found the trick to our WordPress admin login not working in Firefox or Chrome.

Get into your WordPress files and find:  wp-config.php

You’ll need to edit this page and add a couple of simple lines.

Look for either something like this:

define('ABSPATH', dirname(__FILE__) . '/');

OR

/** Absolute path to the WordPress directory. */
if ( !defined(‘ABSPATH’) )
define(‘ABSPATH’, dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/’);

Add the following two lines.

define(‘WP_HOME’,’http://www.YOURSITE.com’);
define(‘WP_SITEURL’,’http://www.YOURSITE.com’);

suddenly everything started working for me.  Now, my new web guru (Mike Golden) can get back to work creating our new masterpieces.

Thanks for reading,

Well, since I’ve been busy updating all my materials for the big upcoming conference, I thought i’d do a quick post of how to add a youtube video as an embedded object into your web pages.  All and all, it’s pretty simple, but I’m glad someone else gave me the first one, so I could just mimic it going forward 🙂

<object width=”640″ height=”360″ classid=”clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000″ codebase=”http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0″><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true” /><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always” /><param name=”src” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/XXXX?version=3&amp;hl=en_US” /><param name=”allowfullscreen” value=”true” /><embed width=”640″ height=”360″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/XXXX?version=3&amp;hl=en_US” allowFullScreen=”true” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” /></object>

Now the important pieces are the width, height and the src parameter.  You need to make sure you update each of these in BOTH places they show up.  in addition, when you upload your video to youtube, you get a full address, but here you just need the last piece of it.  in the code above, you see XXXX.  Replace XXXX with the last portion of the YouTube web address (everything after the last /).  And magically, you get a nice embedded youtube player directly in your webpage.

It’s not rocket science, but for a web novice like me, tricks like this are invaluable.

Thanks for reading.